My Homepage

May be an AI Researcher.

Greetings!

Zilin Xiao is a second-year CS PhD student in VisLang lab at Rice University, fortunately advised by Prof. Vicente Ordonez. His recent research interests lie in:

  • Knowledge Grounding across Different Modalities
  • Foundation Models for Information Retrieval
  • Modern Large Language(-Vision) Models

[GitHub] GitHub followers [Personal Email] [Calendly Schudule]


News

[2024.09] ReHEAT is selected as oral spotlight presentation at COLM'24!

[2024.07] ReHEAT is accepted to COLM'24. We explore the connection between language models and a famous psychological cognitive trap called representativeness heuristic.

[2024.07] AutoVER is accepted to ECCV'24. We augment modern multi-modal language model with precise entity retrieval ability w/ guided generation.

[2024.05] Zilin joined Tencent AI Lab Seattle as a research intern.

[2023.10] Two first-authored papers are accepted to EMNLP'23 (InsGENEL for Main and CoherentED for Findings).

[2023.08] Zilin is now a first-year PhD student at Rice.

[2022.08] Zilin joined Deep Ivy as a part-time MLE. Join us in building a unified machine learning framework!

[2022.08] Zilin joined EdgeML Team @ Microsoft as a gap-year research intern.


Education

Rice University
Ph.D. in Computer Science with Prof. Vicente Ordóñez Román
Aug 2023 - Present

Sichuan University
B.Eng. in Computer Science with Prof. Yanan Sun
Sep 2018 - Jun 2022


Experience

Tencent AI Lab Seattle
Research Internship with Dr. Hongming Zhang, May. 2024 - Aug. 2024
Focus on efficient decoding for large language models.

Microsoft
Residency Research Internship with Dr. Ming Gong and Linjun Shou, Aug. 2022 - Jun. 2023
Focus on knowledge-aware and topic-driven entity linking with retrieval-augmented language models.

Deep Ivy Inc.
Part-time Machine Learning Engineer with Daniel Lenton, Aug. 2022 - Nov. 2022
Develop tensor and gradient conversion modules for Ivy among different ML Frameworks.

MEGVII Research
Research Internship with Prof. Shuaicheng Liu, Mar. 2021 - Jul. 2021
Focus on unsupervised image alignment and 3D vision.

Machine Intelligence Lab, Sichuan University
Research Assistant with Prof. Yanan Sun, Jun. 2020 - Jun. 2022
Focus on evolutionary neural architecture search and its related applications on computer vision.


Awards & Service

National Scholarship Top 0.2% nationwide, 2019

National Scholarship Top 0.2% nationwide, 2020

Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis of Sichuan University 2022.06

Star of Computer Science, Sichuan University 2022.06

Reviewer: EMNLP 2023, ACL ARR 2024, ACL 2024 Workshop KnowledgeNLP, NeurIPS 2024, ICLR 2025

Teaching Assistant: 2024 Fall COMP 554 - Reinforcement Learning


Hobbies (Click to Expand)

Blockchain: I believe blockchain-driven technologies will eventually change the order of global finance. Fans of Solidity Programming, Cryptocurrencies and DeFi.

Trading: Observing the market and making profits.

Law: Law trains people to think logically. Knowledge of the Criminal Laws in Mainland China.

Flight Simulator: Enjoy Airbus A320-neo on Microsoft Flight Simulator!