I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at UC San Diego. My research interests broadly span natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. My group’s research is generously supported by grants from Google, Amazon, Apple, the AI for Science program, and other sponsors. I received my PhD from University of Washington (UW, NLP) working with Yejin Choi. We are hiring Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers, and are also looking for visiting students interested in collaborating on the SimWorld project. Please check out here.
If you are applying to the Ph.D. program and are interested in working with me, please list me as your primary PI so that I can review your application.
Research
Building AI agents that can interact, reason, and generalize in complex environments.
- Controllable, constrained, and creative reasoning (e.g., Latent Reasoning; Flow of Reasoning; COLD-Decoding)
- Self-evolving, any-time learning — agents that continue to learn during deployment, not only during training (e.g., LLM Memory)
- Open-ended world and agent modeling (e.g., SimWorld)
- AI reasoning for science and real-world systems (e.g., Chemistry Reasoning)
News
- [2025-11] Our lab is grateful to receive research support from Apple, Amazon, and Google.
- [2025-10] We’re partnering with Microsoft Research on Multi-agent collaberation and LLM memory.
- [2025-09] We’re excited to have 5 papers accepted to the NeurIPS 2025 including 1 spotlight.
- [2024-09] My CSE291: Large Model Reasoning lectures start on September 27th!
- [2024-07] I'm super excited to join UCSD CSE!
- [2024-06] I finished visiting AI2 mosaic as an Young Investigator.