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Kai-Wei Chang

  • Associate Professor @ UCLA-CS
    Amazon Scholar at @ Alexa AI
  • kw AT kwchang DOT net
  • UCLA Eng VI Rm 374
  • Natural Language Processing
    Machine Learning

Short Bio:

I am an associate professor at UCLA and an Amazon Scholar at Alexa AI. My research interests are twofold:

  • Trustworthy NLP: we published pioneering works on aligning NLP models with human values focusing on fairness in NLU and generative AI, as well as enhancing their robustness. I orgainze Trustworthy NLP workshops at NAACL/ACL.

  • Multimodal Foundation Models: we developed VisualBERT, one of the first vision-language models, and SOTA VL models, including GLIP and DesCo, that can recognize objects through langauge descriptions.

  • Reasoning in NLP: We developed a method enabling LLMs to adhere to specified constraints. Additionally, we study the commonsense, mathematical, and logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs.

I was selected as a Sloan Fellow (2021), AAAI senior member (2023). Several papers from our team are top-10 cited papers at AI conferences, and some received awards, such as Best Paper in EMNLP (2017), KDD (2010) and Oustanding Paper at ACL (2023). My research is supported by NSF, IARPA, ONR, NIH, and DARPA as well as industrial partners, including Taboola, Amazon, Facebook, CISCO, OptumLabs, and Google.

Join us! We are looking for prospective students and postdocs, please read this.

UCLA Natural Language Processing Group (see our members)

Selected Recent Papers

  1. VideoCon: Robust video-language alignment via contrast captions, Hritik Bansal, Yonatan Bitton, Idan Szpektor, Kai-Wei Chang, and Aditya Grover, in CVPR, 2024. Details
  2. Chameleon: Plug-and-Play Compositional Reasoning with Large Language Models, Pan Lu, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Michel Galley, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu, and Jianfeng Gao, in NeurIPS, 2023. Details
  3. DesCo: Learning Object Recognition with Rich Language Descriptions, Liunian Harold Li, Zi-Yi Dou, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in NeurIPS, 2023. Details
  4. Dynosaur: A Dynamic Growth Paradigm for Instruction-Tuning Data Curation, Da Yin, Xiao Liu, Fan Yin, Ming Zhong, Hritik Bansal, Jiawei Han, and Kai-Wei Chang, in EMNLP, 2023. Details
  5. Kelly is a Warm Person, Joseph is a Role Model: Gender Biases in LLM-Generated Reference Letters, Yixin Wan, George Pu, Jiao Sun, Aparna Garimella, Kai-Wei Chang, and Nanyun Peng, in EMNLP-Findings, 2023. Details
  6. CleanCLIP: Mitigating Data Poisoning Attacks in Multimodal Contrastive Learning, Hritik Bansal, Nishad Singhi, Yu Yang, Fan Yin, Aditya Grover, and Kai-Wei Chang, in ICCV, 2023. Details
  7. Controllable Text Generation with Neurally-Decomposed Oracle, Tao Meng, Sidi Lu, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in NeurIPS, 2022. Details
  8. Broaden the Vision: Geo-Diverse Visual Commonsense Reasoning, Da Yin, Liunian Harold Li, Ziniu Hu, Nanyun Peng, and Kai-Wei Chang, in EMNLP, 2021. Details
  9. Harms of Gender Exclusivity and Challenges in Non-Binary Representation in Language Technologies, Sunipa Dev, Masoud Monajatipoor, Anaelia Ovalle, Arjun Subramonian, Jeff Phillips, and Kai-Wei Chang, in EMNLP, 2021. Details
  10. Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints, Jieyu Zhao, Tianlu Wang, Mark Yatskar, Vicente Ordonez, and Kai-Wei Chang, in EMNLP, 2017. Details

About Me

Experience (CV)

Teaching

Service

  • Associate Program Chair: AAAI 23
  • Ethics Committee Chair: NAACL 22
  • Associate Editor: JAIR (23 -), ARR
  • Senior Area Chair: NAACL 21
  • Orgainzer: Workshop on Trustworthy NLP NAACL 21, 22, ACL 23
  • Orgainzer: Workshop on Deep Structured Prediction, ICML 17
  • Orgainzer: Workshop on Structured Prediction for NLP, EMNLP 16, 17
  • Area Chair: NAACL 18, 19, 22 EMNLP 19, 20, 22, 23 ACL 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 AAAI 20, 21, 22, ICML 23, Neurip 22, 23, ICLR 23.
  • Senior PC: AAAI 18, AAAI 19, ICML 20, IJCAI 20, 21.
  • Reviwer: NAACL/ACL/EMNLP/CoNLL (since 2013); EMNLP 2018 Best Reviewer. AAAI/ICML/NeurIPS (since 2013).
  • JAIR Editorial Board (19-22)
  • Handbook Chair, EMNLP 18 /div>