Xinliang (Frederick) Zhang | 张心亮

Hi there, I am Xinliang (Frederick) Zhang. I am from Hangzhou. My Chinese name is 张心亮. Usually, I go by Frederick.

I am a 4th-year CSE Ph.D. candidate at University of Michigan (UM). My advisor is Dr. Lu Wang and I am a member of LAUNCH Lab. I am also affiliated with Michigan AI Lab.

I received my B.S. degrees from the Ohio State University (OSU) in Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE) and Math (Minor). I also obtianed my B.Eng. degree from Sichuan University (SCU) in Industrial Engineering (IE). I was fortunate to have Dr. Huan Sun as my advisor at OSU and proud of being part of SunLab. I was also privileged to work closely with Dr. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe.

I spent some fun time as a reserach scientist intern at Adobe Research in Bay Area (May-Oct. 2024) and Bloomberg AI in NYC (May-Aug 2023).

My reserch interests lie in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Deep Learning (DL), Machine Learning (ML) and Computational Social Science (CSS). Meanwhile, I am a regular PC member/reviewer for NLP venues (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, COLING and ACL ARR).

• I am actively investigating Efficient LLMs (training and inference) and Language Agents (LLM personalization and LLM-based society simulation).
• During the first half of my PhD journey, I focused on Structural Learning and Multi-granularity Information Extraction, as well as Narrative Understanding.
• I used to work on Natural Language Inference, Information Retrieval, and Question Answering & Generation as an undergraduate researcher.
• I am also interested in code generation, investigating Annotation Disagreements, and NLP applications for Social Science and Healthcare (Clinical NLP).

I was awarded Outstanding Reviewer at EMNLP 2024 and NAACL 2022. My work received Best Paper Award at BIBM 2021.

I am on the job market this year, actively seeking industry research scientist position starting in 2026! Please feel free to reach out if you'd like to discuss opportunities.

More about me:

• My broad personal (academic) interests extend to Optimization, Applied Mathematics, Statistics and Linguistics. Explore more (academic) interests now!
• I am passionate about language learning as well, especially East Asian languages. I am almost always fascinated with the stunning beauty of languages.
• I am amazed by Brushtalk in ancient times, and I hope the NLP advancements I am dedicted to will help realize a new form of Brushtalk across all nations in modern times. While pseudo-Chinese might be a starting point, what would be the next chapter to be more inclusive?

You may reach out to me at xlfzhang@umich.edu.