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Nanyun (Violet) Peng

  • Associate Professor @ UCLA CS
  • Visiting Academics @ Amazon AGI
  • violetpeng AT cs DOT ucla DOT edu
  • UCLA Eng VI Rm 397A
  • Natural Language Processing
    Machine Learning

Welcome!

I am an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of University of California, Los Angeles, and a Visiting Academics at the Amazon AGI org. I direct the PLUSLAB (Peng's Language Understanding and Synthesis Lab) at UCLA, with the vision to develop robust Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to transcend communication barriers and make AI agents true companions for humans.
Central to my vision is the advancement of AI creativity, which I believe is crucial for fostering more inspiring and dynamic human-AI interactions. By equipping AI systems with creative capabilities, we enable them to engage in more meaningful, contextually rich ways and offer innovative solutions to complex problems.
To realize this research vision, My group's research encompasses controllable (creative) language generation, multi-modal foundation models, automatic evaluation of foundation models, and low-resource, multilingual natural language understanding (NLU). By integrating these diverse areas, we aim to create AI systems that not only understand and generate language with precision but also exhibit the creativity needed to engage in meaningful, contextually rich dialogues. Our ultimate goal is to empower AI to assist, collaborate, and inspire, thereby enhancing the quality of human life through innovative and accessible technological solutions.
I got my PhD in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, Center for Language and Speech Processing, after that, I spent three awesome years at University of Southern California as a Research Assistant Professor at the Computer Science Department, and a Research Lead at the Information Sciences Institute.

News

Announcements

  • Join us! Prospective students please read this.

Upcoming Travel

Recent News

May 2024

  • The PLUSLab has six papers accepted to ACL 2024, two to the main conference and four to the findings; See everyone in Bangkok!
  • I got tenure at UCLA! Thank you, all my mentors, students, collaborators, and colleagues for your consistent help and support!
  • The PLUSLab has four papers accepted to ICML 2024; See everyone in Vienna!

Apr 2024

Mar 2024

  • The PLUSLab has six papers accepted to NAACL 2024; five to the main conference and one to the findings. See everyone in Mexico City!

Feb 2024

  • Congratulations, Masoud, for his paper on Pre-training medical multimodal models accepted to LREC-COLING 2024.

Jan 2024

  • Congratulations, Kevin, for his paper on reinforcement learning with contrastive distillation accepted to ICLR 2024.
  • Congratulations, Derek, for his paper on data-augmentation for event extraction accepted to AAAI 2024; and another on event-empowered information pathway accetped to AAAI 2024 system demonstration track.

Oct 2023

  • The PLUSLab has ten papers accepted to EMNLP 2023; seven to the main conference and three to the findings.

Sep 2023

May 2023

  • Congrats Honghua and Meihua for their paper Gelato acceptence at ICML 2023!
  • Thrilled to receive the 2023 Google Research Scholar. Thank Google for the generous support!
  • The PLUSLab has twelve papers accepted to ACL 2023; eleven to the main conference and one to the findings.

Oct 2022

  • Our NADO paper is selected as an Oral paper at Neurips 2022!
  • The PLUSLab has eight papers accepted to EMNLP 2022; four to the main conference and four to the findings.

Sep 2022

  • Congrats Sidi and Zi-Yi, for their papers accepted to Neurips 2022!
  • Congrats Zi-Yi, for winning an Amazon-UCLA PhD Fellowship!

Aug 2022

  • Congrats Jiao, for winning an Amazon-USC PhD Fellowship!

Jun 2022

  • Congrats Alex, for winning the Outstanding Paper Award from NAACL 2022.
  • We receive a funding from DARPA to work on learning information pathway. Thank DARPA for the generous support!
  • I will serve as an Area Chair for AAAI 2022.

May 2022

  • I will serve as an Area Chair for EMNLP 2022.

Apr 2022

  • I am invited to give an Early Career Spotlight Talk at IJCAI 2022.
  • I will serve as a Senior Area Chair for AACL 2022.
  • The PLUSLab has seven papers accepted to NAACL 2022 main conference.

Mar 2022

  • Congrats Zi-Yi, for his paper acceptance to CVPR 2022.

Feb 2022

Jan 2022

  • Thank Amazon Alexa AI for the generous gift to fund our research on Creative Generation.
  • Thank Cisco for the faculty award to fund our research on Generative Models for Information Extraction tasks.

Dec 2021

  • The PLUSLab has a paper accepted to AAAI 2022 as oral presentation, and a paper to AAAI Deep Learning on Graphs DLG-AAAI 2022 workshop.
  • I will serve as an action editor for ARR January 2022 and NAACL 2022.

Sep 2021

  • I will serve as an action editor for ARR November 2021 and ACL 2022.

Aug 2021

  • The PLUSLab has nine papers accepted to EMNLP 2021; seven to the main conference and two to the findings of ACL.

Jul 2021

  • I will serve as a Publicity Chair for NAACL 2022!
  • Thank JPMorgan for the Outstanding Faculty Researcher Award!

Jun 2021

  • I will serve as a Workshop Chair for IJCAI 2022!

May 2021

  • The PLUSLab has four papers accepted to ACL 2021; Three to the main conference and one to the findings of ACL.
  • I will give an invited talk at NAACL 2021 Narrative Understanding workshop!

Apr 2021

  • I will give an invited talk at Google Research!
  • I will give an invited talk at Microsoft Research!

Mar 2021

  • The PLUSLab has three long papers accepted to NAACL 2021.

Jan 2021

  • The PLUSLab has a long paper accepted to EACL 2021.

Dec 2020

  • The PLUSLab has 2 papers accepted to AAAI 2021.

Oct 2020

  • I will give an invited talk at IBM Research!
  • I will serve as a Area Chair (AC) of the Machine Learning Track for ACL 2021.
  • I will serve as a Senior Area Chair (SAC) of the Generation Track for NAACL 2021.

Sep 2020

  • I will give an invited talk at Amazon!
  • The PLUSLab has 9 papers accepted to EMNLP 2020. 5 long papers to the main conference and 4 papers to the findings of EMNLP.

Aug 2020

  • I will serve as an Area Chair for AAAI 2021.

Jun 2020

Apr 2020

Mar 2020

  • I will serve as an Area Chair for the Information Extraction track at EMNLP 2020.

Feb 2020

Jan 2020

  • Giving an invited talk at USC CS.
  • Giving an invited talk at UCLA CS.

Nov 2019


Peng’s Language Understanding & Synthesis (PLUS) Lab

Selected Recent Papers


About Me

Experience

Selected Awards and Recognitions

Teaching