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May be an AI Researcher.

Greetings!

Zilin Xiao is a first-year CS PhD student at Rice University. He was fortunated to work at MEGVII Research, Microsoft. His recent research interests lie in:

  • Aligning Foundation Models with Information Retrieval Tasks (EMNLP'23a, EMNLP'23b)
  • Language Agents and Vision Generalists
  • Entity-centered Multi-modal Understanding

[GitHub] [Personal Email]

Tips: Enquiries relating to personal projects are preferred to be discussed at the issue topic of the specific repository or via emails. Other methods of contacting me (QQ, Wechat, etc.) ARE NOT welcomed unless advised.


News

[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.

[2022.04] One paper is accepted to IJCNN'22.

[2021.05] Zilin's team Data Oriented ranks top 3 out of 600+ teams in Plant Pathology 2021 - FGVC8 Kaggle competition (originally for CVPRW2021) [Leaderboard here]. Thank Jiazhi's hard work!

[2020.12] Zilin has been awarded the National Scholarship for 2 successive years!

[2020.12] Zilin earned Grand Prize of the 1st MegMeet Cup Technology Innovation Competition with the project Hyper-Table-OCRGitHub stars.

[2020.08] Zilin earned the Second Prize of China Software Cup: College Student Software Design Competition.

[2020.06] Zilin joined Prof. Yanan Sun's Lab as a research assistant, focusing on evolutionary neural architecture search and its related works.


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

Microsoft
Residency Research Internship with 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


Hobbies (Click to Expand)

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

Law: I believe law trains people to think logically. Knowledge of the Criminal Law of Mainland China;

Flight Simulator: Big fan of Microsoft Flight Simulator and XPlane. 200h+ flight history on A320-neo; Knowledge of taking off, Autopilot, ILS landing, Visual Approach, Air Traffic Control. Want to fly real planes in the future.