Yu Yang
About Me
Hello! I'm Yu Yang (杨雨), a final-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where I am fortunate to be advised by Baharan Mirzasoleiman. My research primarily focuses on understanding and improving large-scale training data for efficient and robust learning.
I'm also a founding research scientist of Virtue AI, where I lead the evaluation and red-teaming for code generation models and agents.
I used to live in Beijing and Los Angeles, and I'm currently based in San Francisco.
Email: yuyang AT cs.ucla.edu
Awards
⭐ UCLA Dissertation Year Award, 2024
⭐ Amazon Doctoral Student Fellowship, 2022
⭐ UCLA Computer Science Fellowship, 2021
News
09/2024: One paper SmallToLarge (S2L): Scalable Data Selection for Fine-tuning Large Language Models by Summarizing Training Trajectories of Small Models has been accepted to NeurIPS 2024!
08/2024: Our paper AIR-Bench 2024 was covered by WIRED!
06/2024: I was selected to receive the Dissertation Year Award! ⭐
02/2024: Invited presentation at UCLA Research in the Age of AI Symposium.
01/2024: One paper Identifying Spurious Biases Early in Training through the Lens of Simplicity Bias has been accepted to AISTATS 2024!
01/2024: One paper Data Distillation Can Be Like Vodka: Distilling More Times For Better Quality has been accepted to ICLR 2024!
Experience
2024
Founding Research Scientist, Virtue AI
2023
Research Scientist Intern, AI Systems Machine Learning @ FAIR at Meta
Project: Decoding Data Quality via Synthetic Corruptions: Embedding-guided Pruning of Code Data
[Paper]
2022
Research Intern, Robustness of Platform Models in Language and Vision @ Microsoft Research
With Besmira Nushi, Hamid Palangi
Project: Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Multi-modal Models during Fine-tuning
[Paper @ ICML] [Code]
2021
Applied Scientist Intern, Computer Vision @ Amazon Alexa AI
With Yue (Rex) Wu, Varsha Hedau
Project: Enhancing Fairness in Face Detection in Computer Vision Systems by Demographic Bias Mitigation
[Paper @ AIES] [Dataset Release]
2024
SmallToLarge (S2L): Scalable Data Selection for Fine-tuning Large Language Models by Summarizing Training Trajectories of Small Models
Yu Yang, Siddhartha Mishra, Jeffrey N Chiang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman
Accepted to Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.
[Preprint]
Few-shot Adaption to Distribution Shifts By Mixing Source and Target Embeddings
Yihao Xue, Ali Payani, Yu Yang, and Baharan Mirzasoleiman
In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024.
[Paper]
Yu Yang, Siddhartha Mishra, Jeffrey N Chiang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman
Accepted to Proceedings of the 38th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024.
[Preprint]
Few-shot Adaption to Distribution Shifts By Mixing Source and Target Embeddings
Yihao Xue, Ali Payani, Yu Yang, and Baharan Mirzasoleiman
In Proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2024.
[Paper]
Data Distillation Can Be Like Vodka: Distilling More Times For Better Quality
Yu Yang*, Xuxi Chen*, Zhangyang Wang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman (*Equal Contribution)
In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
[Preprint]
Yu Yang*, Xuxi Chen*, Zhangyang Wang, Baharan Mirzasoleiman (*Equal Contribution)
In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
[Preprint]
SIEVE: Multimodal Dataset Pruning Using Image Captioning Models
Anas Mahmoud, Mostafa Elhoushi, Amro Abbas, Yu Yang, Newsha Ardalani, Hugh Leather, Ari S Morcos
In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
[Paper]
2023
Robust Learning with Progressive Data Expansion Against Spurious Correlation
Yu Yang*, Yihe Deng*, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Quanquan Gu (*Equal Contribution)
In Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023.
[Paper] [Code] [Project Page]
Yu Yang*, Yihe Deng*, Baharan Mirzasoleiman, Quanquan Gu (*Equal Contribution)
In Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023.
[Paper] [Code] [Project Page]
Decoding Data Quality via Synthetic Corruptions: Embedding-guided Pruning of Code Data
Yu Yang, Aaditya K Singh, Mostafa Elhoushi, Anas Mahmoud, Kushal Tirumala, Fabian Gloeckle, Baptiste Rozière, Carole-Jean Wu, Ari S Morcos, Newsha Ardalani
The 3rd Workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP-III), NeurIPS 2023. (Oral)
[Paper]
2022
Enhancing Fairness in Face Detection in Computer Vision Systems by Demographic Bias Mitigation
Yu Yang, Aayush Gupta, Jianwei Feng, Yue Rex Wu, Vivek Yadav, Varsha Hedau, Prateek Singhal, Pradeep Natarajan, Jungseock Joo
In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), 2022.
[Paper] [Dataset]
Yu Yang, Aayush Gupta, Jianwei Feng, Yue Rex Wu, Vivek Yadav, Varsha Hedau, Prateek Singhal, Pradeep Natarajan, Jungseock Joo
In Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), 2022.
[Paper] [Dataset]
Teaching
Teaching Assistant of COM SCI M148 - Introduction to Data Science, Winter 2024
Teaching Assistant of COM SCI M148 - Introduction to Data Science, Winter 2023
Reader of COM SCI M146 - Introduction to Machine Learning, MATH 32A - Calculus of Several Variables
Academic Activities
Reviewed for ICML 2022-2024, NeurIPS 2022-2023, ICLR 2023-2024, CVPR 2023-2024, ICCV 2023, AAAI 2024, Sparsity in Neural Networks Workshop 2021-2023, New Frontiers in Adversarial Machine Learning 2023