Rui Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department of Penn State University. He is a co-director of the PSU Natural Language Processing Lab. His research interest lies in Trustworthy Human-Centered AI, LLM Agents, and AI for Science. He received an NSF CAREER Award, a Senior Area Chair Paper Award at NAACL 2025, and an Outstanding Area Chair Award at EMNLP 2024. His research is supported by a Microsoft Research Award, an Amazon Research Award, an eBay Research Award, and a Cisco Research Award. He received his B.S. degrees from both Shanghai Jiao Tong University and University of Michigan in 2015 and received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2020. He has done research internships at IBM, Grammarly, and Google.

Research Interests I am broadly interested in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. I work on both Science of LLMs and LLMs for Science, especially focusing on

• Trustworthy Human-Centered AI (VisOnlyQA, ReaLMistake, FairSumm, FameSumm, MACSum, Summ^N)
• LLM Agents (Chain of Agents, XSemPLR, Spider, EditSQL, MultiHiertt, Hermes)
• AI for Scientific Discoveries (AI for Nursing, Security, Healthcare, Education)

News

• 1/2026: One paper is accepted at ICLR 2026!
• 1/2026: We received a CSRAI seed grant working on agents for urban resilience.
• 1/2026: Welcome Binglin joining our lab!
• 12/2025: Congratulations to Eugene on his Honorable Mention for the 2025-2026 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award!
• 10/2025: We received a funding from Open Philanthropy working on AI Safety for Reinforcement Learning. Thanks, Open Philanthropy!
• 10/2025: Our group's first PhD student Yusen successfully defended his PhD dissertation on Multi-agent LLMs! Big Congratulations, Dr. Yusen Zhang! Yusen will join Columbia University as a postdoc.
• 10/2025: We are hosting a "AI for Math" Minisymposium at 2025 SIAM New York-New Jersey-Pennsylvania Section Conference.
• 8/2025: Welcome Hieu joining our lab!
• 8/2025: Our NSF proposal on AI for Digital Twin in Healthcare is awarded!
• 7/2025: One paper is accepted at ICCV 2025, and one paper at COLM 2025!
• 6/2025: Congratulations to Nan and Sarkar for receiving the Penn State Graduate School Student Persistence Scholarship!
• 6/2025: We received a funding from Raytheon working on LLM hallucination. Thanks, Raytheon!
• 5/2025: Four papers (2 main, 1 findings, 1 demo) are accepted at ACL 2025!
• 5/2025: I gave a talk at U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Trustworthy and Collaborative LLM Agents.
• 4/2025: Our paper on fairness of multidocument summarization has received an SAC Paper Award at NAACL 2025!
• 4/2025: Congratulations to Ryo on passing the comprehensive exam!
• 1/2025: Two papers are accepted at ICLR 2025, and two papers are accepted at NAACL 2025.
• 11/2024: We are organizing a workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization at EMNLP 2025.
• 11/2024: Honored to be recognized as an Outstanding Area Chair at EMNLP 2024!
• 11/2024: We received an NSF NAIRR Pilot grant to support our project on AI for Nursing. Thanks, NSF!
• 10/2024: We will present a tutorial on Enhancing LLM Capabilities Beyond Scaling Up and three papers on LLM self-correction, LLM deductive reasoning, and LLM for assisting research at EMNLP 2024.
• 9/2024: One paper on multiagent collaboratoin for long-context tasks is accepted at NeurIPS 2024.
• 9/2024: My NSF CAREER proposal Trustworthy Human-Centered Summarization is awarded!
• 9/2024: Two papers are accepted at EMNLP 2024.
• 9/2024: We received an award on AI for Nursing. Thanks, NIH and PennAITech!
• 9/2024: We received an Microsoft research award on AI and the New Future of Work. Thanks, Microsoft!
• 8/2024: One survey paper on LLM self-correction is accepted at TACL 2024.
• 7/2024: One paper on LLM error detection is accepted at COLM 2024.
• 6/2024: Congratulations to Haoran for passing his Comprehensive Exam!
• 6/2024: We are organizing a CSE Summer Camp on Exploring AI with CS and Minecraft for middle school students!
• 5/2024: Two papers are accepted at ACL 2024.
• 5/2024: Serve as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2024 and EMNLP 2024.
• 4/2024: Congratulations to Nan for passing his Comprehensive Exam!
• 3/2024: Two papers on fairness of LLM summarization and LLM compression have been accepted to NAACL 2024.
• 3/2024: We are organizing an AI for Research workshop at IJCAI 2024. Please submit your work!
• 1/2024: One paper on text generation evalaution has been accepted to ICLR 2024.
• 12/2023: I give a talk on Fairness of LLMs on Summarization at EMNLP 2023 NewSumm workshop.
• 11/2023: I am a candidate for NAACL Board Member to serve our community! Please cast your vote!
• 11/2023: Congratulations to Sarkar for passing his Comprehensive Exam!
• 10/2023: Three papers on factual medical summarization, parameter-efficient finetuning for sequence labeling, and LLM for programming education have been accepted to EMNLP 2023.
• 10/2023: One paper on semantic parsing for security standard documents has been accepted to USENIX Security 2024.
• 8/2023: Welcome Ryo and Xiaoxin joining our lab!
• 8/2023: Congratulations to Yusen for passing his Comprehensive Exam!
• 7/2023: Serve as a Tutorial Chair for NAACL 2024 and an Area Chair for EMNLP 2023, NeurIPS 2023, and AACL 2023.
• 2/2023: Our EvoquerBOT team is participating in the Amazon Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge 2. "Alexa, Let's work together"!
• 2/2023: Please join us on the panel on Knowledge, NLP, and LLM at the AAAI 2023 workshop on Knowledge Augmented Methods for NLP!
• 1/2023: This semester I am teaching CSE 587 Deep Learninig for Natural Language Processing.
• 12/2022: Give talks at University of Pennsylvania and Penn State CSE Semniar on Semantic Parsing in the Era of Large Language Models.
• 11/2022: Congratulations to Jason for winning the CAFE AI Award for Best Undergraduate Honors Thesis!
• 10/2022: Three papers on semantic parsing and structured knowledge accepted in EMNLP 2022.
• 8/2022: Give invited talks at Amazon, The University of Tokyo, PSU REU Seminar, and MLNLP Seminar on Contrastive Learning for NLP: A Case Study in Few-shot Named Entity Recognition.
• [Tutorial@NAACL2022] We are presenting a tutorial on Contrastive Data and Learning for Natural Language Processing at NAACL 2022 with Yangfeng Ji, Yue Zhang, Rebecca Passonneau.
• [Workshop@NAACL2022] We are co-organizing the Workshop on Structured and Unstructured Knowledge Integration (SUKI) at NAACL 2022.
• [Workshop@NAACL2022] We are co-organizing the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA) at NAACL 2022.
• 6/2022: Congratulations to Yusen and Sarkar on winning the Dr. Tse-Yun Feng Graduate Student Award (outstanding RA award in the CSE department)!
• 5/2022: Congratulations to graduate students starting their research internships at Amazon and Microsoft!
• 3/2022: Four papers accepted in ACL 2022 on Long-Text Summarization, Few-shot NER, Numerical Reasoning in Tables and Text. Congratulations to Yusen, Sarkar, Yilun, and all co-authors!
• 1/2022: Welcome Haoran joining our lab!
• 9/2021: Two papers accepted in Findings of EMNLP 2021. Congratulations to Yusen and all the co-authors!
• 8/2021: Welcome Yusen, Nan, and Sarkar joining our lab!
• 5/2021: Two papers (1 long and 1 long Findings) are accepted at ACL 2021.
• 4/2021: Receive an Amazon Research Award to work on Conversational QA systems over Tables. Thanks Amazon!
• 3/2021: DART is accepted at NAACL 2021.
• 3/2021: Serving as an Area Chair in Summarization Track for EMNLP 2021 and NLPCC 2021.
• 1/2021: SCoRe is accepted at ICLR 2021.
• 12/2020: Serving as an Area Chair in Summarization Track for NAACL 2021.
• 10/2020: Talk at UPenn CLunch.
• 11/2020: We are organizing the workshop on Interactive and Executable Semantic Parsing (IntEx-SemPar 2020) located with EMNLP 2020. Please submit your work!

Media

• 1/2026. PSU News: Center for Socially Responsible AI awards seed funding to seven diverse projects
• 11/2025. PSU News: Q&A: Are developers prepared to control super-intelligent AI?
• 10/2025. PSU News: Can digital replicas of patients help personalize Alzheimer’s treatment?
• 8/2025. PSU News: Q&A: How are researchers optimizing AI systems for science?
• 2/2025. Communications of the ACM: Self-Correction in Large Language Models
• 1/2025. Google Research Blog: Chain of Agents: Large language models collaborating on long-context tasks
• 10/2024. PSU News: Q&A: Centering people, advancing artificial intelligence with NSF CAREER award
• 7/2024. PennAITech: Task-Oriented Multimodal Conversational AI for Assisting Seniors with Daily Tasks
• 2/2024. PSU News: Improving efficiency, reliability of AI medical summarization tools
• 9/2021. PSU News: Two faculty members receive Amazon Research Awards

Selected Publications

QuantLRM: Quantization of Large Reasoning Models via Fine-Tuning Signals

Nan Zhang, Eugene Kwek, Yusen Zhang, Muyu Pan, Suhang Wang, Prasenjit Mitra, Rui Zhang
Preprint   [paper]

Generalizable Process Reward Models via Formally Verified Training Data

Ryo Kamoi, Yusen Zhang, Nan Zhang, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Rui Zhang
Preprint   [paper] [website]

VisOnlyQA: Large Vision Language Models Still Struggle with Visual Perception of Geometric Information

Ryo Kamoi, Yusen Zhang, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Rui Zhang
COLM 2025   [paper] [code]

HRScene: How Far Are VLMs from Effective High-Resolution Image Understanding?

Yusen Zhang, Wenliang Zheng, Aashrith Madasu, Peng Shi, Ryo Kamoi, Hao Zhou, Zhuoyang Zou, Shu Zhao, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Vipul Gupta, Xiaoxin Lu, Nan Zhang, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Avitej Iyer, Renze Lou, Wenpeng Yin, Rui Zhang
ICCV 2025   [paper] [website]

GreaterPrompt: A Unified, Customizable, and High-Performing Open-Source Toolkit for Prompt Optimization

Wenliang Zheng, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Yusen Zhang, Rui Zhang
ACL 2025 - Demo   [paper] [code]

Enhance Multimodal Consistency and Coherence for Text-Image Plan Generation

Xiaoxin Lu, Ranran Haoran Zhang, Yusen Zhang, Rui Zhang
ACL 2025 - Findings   [paper]

GReaTer: Gradients Over Reasoning Makes Smaller Language Models Strong Prompt Optimizers

Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Ryo Kamoi, Bo Pang, Yusen Zhang, Caiming Xiong, Rui Zhang
ICLR 2025   [paper] [code]

Chain of Agents: Large Language Models Collaborating on Long-Context Tasks

Yusen Zhang, Ruoxi Sun, Yanfei Chen, Tomas Pfister, Rui Zhang, Sercan Ö. Arık
NeurIPS 2024   [paper]

When Can LLMs Actually Correct Their Own Mistakes? A Critical Survey of Self-Correction of LLMs

Ryo Kamoi, Yusen Zhang, Nan Zhang, Jiawei Han, Rui Zhang
TACL 2024   [paper]

Fair Abstractive Summarization of Diverse Perspectives

Yusen Zhang, Nan Zhang, Yixin Liu, Alexander Fabbri, Junru Liu, Ryo Kamoi, Xiaoxin Lu, Caiming Xiong, Jieyu Zhao, Dragomir Radev, Kathleen McKeown, Rui Zhang
NAACL 2024   [paper] [code]

XSemPLR: Cross-Lingual Semantic Parsing in Multiple Natural Languages and Meaning Representations

Yusen Zhang, Jun Wang, Zhiguo Wang, Rui Zhang
ACL 2023   [paper] [code]

MACSum: Controllable Summarization with Mixed Attributes

Yusen Zhang, Yang Liu, Ziyi Yang, Yuwei Fang, Yulong Chen, Dragomir Radev, Chenguang Zhu, Michael Zeng, Rui Zhang
TACL 2023   [paper] [code]

Teaching CMPSC 442 Artificial Intelligence, Spring 2025, Spring 2024, Spring 2021.
CMPSC 448 Machine Learning, Fall 2024, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Fall 2020.
CSE 587 Deep Learning for Natural Language Processing, Spring 2023, Spring 2022.