Jia-Chen Gu (顾佳宸)

About Me

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), hosted by Prof. Nanyun (Violet) Peng and Prof. Kai-Wei Chang. I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in June 2022, under the supervision of Prof. Zhen-Hua Ling. I have previously interned at Microsoft (2020-2021) and visited Queen’s University (2019-2020). I fortunately received the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award of ACL 2023 and Best Paper Award of DialDoc@ACL 2022.

My main research interests lie within deep learning for natural language processing, and the first-author papers during my Ph.D. study particularly focused on dialogue systems and retrieval-based language models:

• Retrieval-based dialogue systems: Interactiva Matching Network (IMN, CIKM 2019), Utterance-to-Utterance Interactiva Matching Network (U2U-IMN, TASLP 2020), and Speaker-Aware BERT (SA-BERT, CIKM 2020).
• Knowledge/Persona-grounded conversation: Dually Interactive Matching Network (DIM, EMNLP 2019), Filtering before Iteratively REferring (FIRE, Findings of EMNLP 2020), investigating the role of partners (SIGIR 2021), and detecting speaker personas (EMNLP 2021).
• Multi-party conversation: Pre-trained multi-party language model (MPC-BERT, ACL 2021), Heterogeneous graphical conversation model (HeterMPC, ACL 2022), a survey on multi-party conversation (IJCAI 2022), Graph-Induced Fine-Tuning (GIFT, ACL 2023), and Maximizing Addressee Deduction Expectation (MADNet, EMNLP 2023), which are systematically organized in our IJCNLP-AACL 2023 Tutorial.

These days, I am also interested in the techniques that can potentially democratize the training and deployment of large language models (LLMs). A list of topics that I am actively working on:

• Retrieval-Augmented LLMs: To augment the capabilities of given LLMs and scale down the size of LLMs via retrieval from knowledge indexes. Recent work: (1) Corrective Retrieval Augmented Generation (CRAG), and (2) TExt Generation via Task-specific and Open-world Knowledge (TEGTOK, Findings of ACL 2022).
• Model Editing: To reduce the cost of upgrading LLMs and enable data-efficient alterations to the behavior of LLMs, specifically within a designated realm of interest, while ensure no adverse impact on other inputs. Recent work: (1) Model Editing Can Hurt General Abilities of LLMs, (2) Neighboring Perturbations of Knowledge Editing on LLMs, and (3) Bidirectional Language Model Editing.

If you are interested in talking about research and life with me, please feel free to reach out.

News

• 2023.12: Will attend NeurIPS 2023 from Dec 11 to Dec 14. See you in New Orleans!
• 2023.12: Invited talk on Multi-Party Conversational AI at Zhejiang University (December 20, 2023).
• 2023.10: To present a tutorial on Model Editing at AAAI 2024, Vancouver, Canada (February 20, 2024).
• 2023.09: Invited talk on "Technology and Applications of Large Language Models" at MLNLP 2023, Online (September 24, 2023).
• 2023.08: To present a tutorial on "Learning WHO Saying WHAT to WHOM in Multi-Party Conversations" at CCKS 2023, Shenyang, China (August 24, 2023) and at IJCNLP-AACL 2023, Bali, Indonesia (November 1, 2023).

Experience & Education

• 2023.11 - Present: Postdoctoral researcher at UCLA, hosted by Prof. Nanyun (Violet) Peng and Prof. Kai-Wei Chang.
• 2022.06 - 2023.10: Postdoctoral researcher at USTC, hosted by Prof. Zhen-Hua Ling.
• 2020.09 - 2021.06: Research intern at Microsoft, hosted by Dr. Chongyang Tao and Dr. Daxin Jiang.
• 2019.12 - 2020.05: Visiting research student at Queen's University, hosted by Prof. Xiaodan Zhu.
• 2017.09 - 2022.06: Ph.D. Degree at USTC, supervised by Prof. Zhen-Hua Ling.
• 2013.09 - 2017.06: B.E. Degree at Hohai University.

Selected Honors

• 2023   Best Paper Honorable Mention Award of ACL 2023
• 2022   Best Paper Award of DialDoc@ACL 2022
• 2022   Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Nomination Award of Chinese Information Processing Society of China
• 2022   Presidential Scholarship of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Top 1%)
• 2022   Outstanding Graduate Award of University of Science and Technology of China
• 2021   China National Scholarship
• 2021   Huayu Scholarship (Top 2 graduates of NERC-SLIP per year)
• 2015   Presidential Yan Kai Scholarship (Top 0.1%, the highest honor of HHU)

Tutorials

• "Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models" at AAAI 2024. [slides]
Ningyu Zhang, Jia-Chen Gu, Yunzhi Yao, Zhen Bi, Shumin Deng.
• "Learning WHO Saying WHAT to WHOM in Multi-Party Conversations" at IJCNLP-AACL 2023. [slides]
Jia-Chen Gu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Zhen-Hua Ling.
• "Learning WHO Saying WHAT to WHOM in Multi-Party Conversations" at CCKS 2023.
Jia-Chen Gu.

Talks

• 2024.02: Guest lecture "Pre-trained Large Language Models" at UCLA CS162.
• 2023.12: Guest lecture "Multi-Party Conversational AI" at Zhejiang University. [slides]
• 2023.09: "Learning Conversation Structures for Multi-Party Conversations" at MLNLP 2023.
• 2023.05: "Learning Conversation Structures for Multi-Party Conversations" at YSSNLP 2023.
• 2022.11: "Multi-Party Conversation Understanding and Generation" at CCF and CAS-ICT.
• 2022.07: "Multi-Party Conversation Understanding and Generation" at MLNLP. [slides]

Shared Tasks

• 2022   Rank first on both subtasks of Track 2 in the Eleventh Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC 11).
• 2020   Rank second under objective metrics and fourth under subjective metrics on Track 1 in the Ninth Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC 9), as the team leader.
• 2019   Rank first, first, third and fourth on subtasks of Track 2 in the Eighth Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC 8), as the first author.
• 2018   Rank second on a subtask of Track 1 in the Seventh Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC 7), as the first author.

Professional Service

• Area Chair:
  • ACL, NAACL
• Program Committee (Reviewer):
  • Conference: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, ACL Rolling Review, COLM, AAAI, IJCAI, NLPCC, CCKS
  • Journal: TASLP, TOIS, TALLIP, CIM, IPM