Tong Zhang

Tong Zhang, CS professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, and Shiqian Ma, applied mathematics and statistics professor at Johns Hopkins University, received a combined $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) award for their collaborative research project, “MFAI: Mathematical Foundations of Structure-Aware Adaptive Machine Learning Algorithms.” 

Illinois computer science professor Tong Zhang, assistant professor Han Zhao, and their students Jingyan Shen, Jiarui Yao, Rui Yang, Yifan Sun, Feng Luo, Rui Pan won the outstanding paper award at EMNLP’ 25 for the paper MiCRo: Mixture Modeling and Context-aware Routing for Personalized Preference Learning.

"R-Tuning: Instructing Large Language Models to Say `I Don't Know'" by CS professors Heng Ji and Tong Zhang with graduate students Yangyi Chen, Yi R. Fung,  and Xingyao Wang was chosen as an Outstanding Paper at NAACL 2024 in Mexico City, Mexico on June 19. The paper's methodology paves the way for a generation of LLMs that interact with humans in a more honest and factually accurate way.

CS professors Heng Ji and Hao Peng and graduate student Chi Han, won an Outstanding Paper Award at the NAACL 2024 Annual Conference for "LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models." The paper presents an innovative and much-needed approach to long-context modeling with LLMs. NAACL 2024 was held in Mexico City, Mexico June 16-21.