Jiayi Zhang

Hi there! You can call me Jiayi Zhang (张嘉怡) or Eleanor!

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I am a first second-year PhD student in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University. I am advised by Prof. Weiyan Shi and a member of the CHATS Lab.

Previously, I was an undergraduate student at University of Michigan (UMich), with a honors major in Computer Science and two minors in Mathmatics and Linguistics. I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Lu Wang at LAUNCH Lab. I was also privileged to work closely with Prof. Zhijing Jin.

My research interest lies on building robust and socially responsible NLP systems that align with human needs and preferences. Currently, I’m particularly interested in:

  • Social simulation: Understanding LLMs’ behavioral patterns and social reasoning in complex social scenarios.
  • Human-AI alignment: Studying the gaps between human-human and human-AI interactions to better align LLMs with diverse human preferences and application scenarios.

News

Oct 01, 2025 New preprint out on Verbalized Sampling: How to Mitigate Mode Collapse and Unlock LLM Diversity.
Sep 01, 2024 Started as a PhD student at Northeastern University, advised by Prof. Weiyan Shi.
Mar 13, 2014 Our paper Analyzing the Role of Semantic Representations in the Era of Large Language Models is accepted to NAACL 2024!

Selected Publications

  1. arXiv
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    Verbalized Sampling: How to Mitigate Mode Collapse and Unlock LLM Diversity
    Jiayi Zhang*, Simon Yu*, Derek Chong*, Anthony Sicilia, Michael R. Tomz, Christopher D. Manning, and Weiyan Shi
    arXiv preprint, 2025
    arXiv Code Website
  2. NAACL
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    Analyzing the Role of Semantic Representations in the Era of Large Language Models
    Zhijing Jin*, Yuen Chen*, Fernando Gonzalez*, Jiarui Liu, Jiayi Zhang, Julian Michael, Bernhard Schölkopf, and Mona Diab
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2024
    arXiv Code

Beyond Work

  • I have two adorable kittens🐈, Rainier and Mia!
  • In my spare time, I like swimming, skating, and ballet🎀.
  • I also played a traditional chinese instrucment, called Chinese lute or Pipa (琵琶).