About

Zhilin Yang is a PhD student in artificial intelligence at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Ruslan Salakhutdinov and William Cohen. His research focused on learning versatile deep representations for natural language understanding. In the past two years, he published 12 papers with 9 first-authored in top AI venues including ICLR, NIPS, and ICML. Notably, his work on the Mixture of Softmaxes (ICLR oral, acceptance rate 2%) identifies and addresses a fundamental limitation of a widely-used deep learning method, and obtains new state-of- the-art results with substantial improvement on a variety of benchmarks. He had research experiences at Facebook AI Research and Google Brain. He won the NVIDIA Pioneering Research Award (~10 worldwide) and is supported by the NVIDIA PhD Fellowships (11 worldwide). He obtained a bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University with Top 1 GPA (out of 124) and the Best Thesis Award (1st place).

Education

Carnegie Mellon University

Ph.D. , Computer Science

Class of 2019

Awards & Publications