Zining Zhu (朱子宁)
zining@cs.toronto.edu
I will join the Stevens Institute of Technology as an Assistant Professor in January 2024. I am currently a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and Vector Institute advised by Frank Rudzicz. I am interested in understanding the mechanisms and abilities of neural network AI systems, and incorporating the findings into controlling the AI systems. In the long term, I look forward to empowering real-world applications with safe and trustworthy AIs that can collaborate with humans.
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Following are some topics I am working on:
- Interpretation: Develop methods to probe deep neural networks -- unveiling what happens among the structures and the neurons, and query the sources of their strong capabilities [W4, C5]. Then, we can incorporate the learned insights into developing better models [C9]. We should also make these probing methods solid -- reliable and valid [C8, C4].
- Explanation: AIs can be more helpful if they can explain to humans, and they have promising potential. Along this topic, we solidify the problem setting of "machine explanation": How to evaluate the explanations? How can we make explanations faithful and useful? We try to leverage the reasoning abilities and the stored commonsense of large language models and facilitate "machine teaching", to diverse audiences.
- Safety, control, alignment: To harness the powerful abilities of AIs, we need better approaches to control their behavior. AIs make errors, hallucinate, and demonstrate biases. We try to quantify these improvement area, and develop methods to address them.
- Applications: Use AI tools to address societal challenges, for example, healthcare and fairness, ideally following a human-AI collaboration paradigm. [C6, C3].
The publication page contains a complete list of my publications.
Education
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University of Toronto 2019 - present Ph.D. in Computer Science Advisor: Frank Rudzicz |
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University of Toronto 2014 - 2019 Bachelor in Engineering Science, Robotics option. |
Employment history
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Amazon, Applied Scientist Intern, 2022 Search - Query Understanding. Advisors: Haoming Jiang, Jingfeng Yang, Sreyashi Nag, and Chao Zhang |
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Tencent Jarvis Lab, Machine Learning Engineering Intern, 2019 Neural language models and pre-training techniques. Advisor: Ruihui Zhao. |
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Winterlight Labs, Research Software Engineer, 2017 - 2018 Automatic detection of dementia from narrative speeches. Advisor: Jekaterina Novikova. |
TripAdvisor, Software Engineering Intern, 2017 Android applications and Java API. |
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Dynamic Systems Lab at UTIAS, Research Assistant, 2016 Enhancing drone controllers using deep neural networks. Advisor: Angela Schoellig. |
Misc
- Marvin Minsky is my great-great-grand advisor (Z Zhu to F Rudzicz to G Hirst to E Charniak to M Minsky)
- I post videos on YouTube channel, and this blog.
- I took some notes about several AI / NLP conferences I attended.
NAACL’18 NAACL’19 AAAI ‘20 ACL ‘20, NAACL ‘21 - I paddled at dragonboat teams: Iron Dragons (2018-2019 season) and Vic Scarlet Dragons (2017-2018 season). I also run occasionally.