My name is Hao Cheng .
I'm a researcher at Microsoft Research and Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington.
Prior to this, I completed my PhD at the University of Washington working with Mari Ostendorf, and got my MSc under the supervision of Dale Schuurmans and Csaba Szepesvári at the University of Alberta.
Email (for company related): {my_last_name}.Hao@microsoft.com
Email (others): {my_first_name}cheng@outlook.com
Research Interest:
In general, my research interest centers around natural language processing and machine learning
(For details and media coverage, check out more on this link)
Updates:
How to boost the model's understanding of private conversations? More annotated data. Collaborate with an LLM to collect data that fits the targeted scenario (DIALGEN).
Augmenting Transformers with long-horizontal memories in a plug-and-play fashion (LongMem).
New ways to chain modules for solving complex open QA by composable multi-tasking retrieval (Chain-of-Skill) or compositional iterative prompting with GPT-4 (Chameleon).
Interested in teaching ChatGPT to faithfully use external knowledge via feedback? Checkout out our LLM-AUGMENTER.
How to answer open-domain questions with chained reasoning over text, knowledge graphs and tables: check out our UDT-QA and CORE.
Our system, UnitedQA, ranked the 1st place based on the automatic evaluation at the NeurIPS 2020 EfficientQA Competition. Please see our paper for more details.
We released our PubmedBERT abstract and full-text, pretrained langauge models for a wide range of biomedical tasks. Please see our paper for more details.
Professional Service
Organizing Committee
Volunteer Chairs for NAACL 2021
Program Committee & Editorial Team
Area Chair/Meta-Reviewer: ACL (2023), EMNLP(2023, 2022), AAAI (2023), COLING (2022)
Reviewer:
--[Journal] Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)
--[Conference] NeurIPS (2023), ACL Roling Review (2021), ACL (2017-2022), EMNLP (2019-2021), NAACL (2019, 2021), AACL (2020), COLING (2018), IJCAI (2015).
[Preprint]
Bo-Ru Lu, Nikita Haduong, Chia-Hsuan Lee, Zeqiu Wu, Hao Cheng, Paul Koester, Jean Utke, Tao Yu, Noah A. Smith, Mari Ostendorf.
Augmenting Language Models with Long-Term Memory
Weizhi Wang, Li Dong, Hao Cheng, Xiaodong Liu, Xifeng Yan, Jianfeng Gao, Furu Wei.
Pre-training Multi-task Contrastive Learning Models for Scientific Literature Understanding
Yu Zhang, Hao Cheng, Zhihong Shen, Xiaodong Liu, Ye-Yi Wang, Jianfeng Gao.
Chameleon: Plug-and-Play Compositional Reasoning with Large Language Models
Pan Lu, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Michel Galley, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Song-Chun Zhu, Jianfeng Gao.
Baolin Peng, Michel Galley, Pengcheng He, Hao Cheng, Yujia Xie, Yu Hu, Qiuyuan Huang, Lars Liden, Zhou Yu, Weizhu Chen, Jianfeng Gao.
Pre-training Transformers for Knowledge Graph Completion
Sanxing Chen, Hao Cheng, Xiaodong Liu, Jian Jiao, Yangfeng Ji, Jianfeng Gao.
A Survey of Knowledge-Intensive NLP with Pre-Trained Language Models
Da Yin, Li Dong, Hao Cheng, Xiaodong Liu, Kai-Wei Chang, Furu Wei, Jianfeng Gao.
Language Models as Inductive Reasoners
Zonglin Yang, Li Dong, Xinya Du, Hao Cheng, Erik Cambria, Xiaodong Liu, Jianfeng Gao, Furu Wei.
[2023]
Understand and Modularize Generator Optimization in ELECTRA-style Pretraining
Chengyu Dong, Liyuan Liu, Hao Cheng, Jingbo Shang, Jianfeng Gao, Xiaodong Liu.
In Proc. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023.
Chain-of-Skills: A Configurable Model for Open-domain Question Answering
Kaixin Ma*, Hao Cheng*, Yu Zhang, Xiaodong Liu, Eric Nyberg, Jianfeng Gao. [*Equal contribution]
In Proc. Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023.
Hao Cheng, Hao Fang, Xiaodong Liu, Jianfeng Gao.
In Proc. Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023.
Fine-Tuning Large Neural Language Models for Biomedical Natural Language Processing
Robert Tinn*, Hao Cheng*, Yu Gu, Naoto Usuyama, Xiaodong Liu, Tristan Naumann, Jianfeng Gao, Hoifung Poon. [*Equal contribution]
Patterns, 2023
Optimizing Bi-Encoder for Named Entity Recognition via Contrastive Learning [Code]
Sheng Zhang, Hao Cheng, Jianfeng Gao, Hoifung Poon.
In Proc. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023.
Visually-Augmented Language Modeling
Weizhi Wang, Li Dong, Hao Cheng, Haoyu Song, Xiaodong Liu, Xifeng Yan, Jianfeng Gao, Furu Wei.
In Proc. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023.
INSCIT: Information-Seeking Conversations with Mixed-Initiative Interactions [Data]
Zeqiu Wu, Ryu Parish, Hao Cheng, Sewon Min, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Mari Ostendorf, Hannaneh Hajishirzi.
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL), 2023.
Self-Verification Improves Few-Shot Clinical Information Extraction
Zelalem Gero, Chandan Singh, Hao Cheng, Tristan Naumann, Michel Galley, Jianfeng Gao, Hoifung Poon.
ICML 3rd Workshop on Interpretable Machine Learning in Healthcare (IMLH), 2023.
[2022]
Open-domain Question Answering via Chain of Reasoning over Heterogeneous Knowledge [Code]
Kaixin Ma*, Hao Cheng*, Xiaodong Liu, Eric Nyberg, Jianfeng Gao. [*Equal contribution]
In Findings of Conf. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-Findings), 2022.
Knowledge-Rich Self-Supervision for Biomedical Entity Linking [Model]
Sheng Zhang*, Hao Cheng*, Shikhar Vashishth*, Cliff Wong, Jinfeng Xiao, Xiaodong Liu, Tristan Naumann, Jianfeng Gao, Hoifung Poon. [*Equal contribution]
In Findings of Conf. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-Findings), 2022.
Unsupervised Learning of Hierarchical Conversation Structure [Code]
Bo-Ru Lu, Yushi Hu, Hao Cheng, Noah A Smith, Mari Ostendorf
In Findings of Conf. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-Findings), 2022.
Open Domain Question Answering with A Unified Knowledge Interface [Code]
Kaixin Ma*, Hao Cheng*, Xiaodong Liu, Eric Nyberg, Jianfeng Gao. [*Equal contribution]
In Proc. Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2022.
Human Parity on CommonsenseQA: Augmenting Self-Attention with External Attention
Yichong Xu, Chenguang Zhu, Shuohang Wang, Siqi Sun, Hao Cheng, Xiaodong Liu, Jianfeng Gao, Pengcheng He, Michael Zeng, Xuedong Huang.
In Proc. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2022.
[2021]
CLUES: Few-Shot Learning Evaluation in Natural Language Understanding
Subhabrata Mukherjee, Xiaodong Liu, Guoqing Zheng, Saghar Hosseini, Hao Cheng, Ge Yang, Christopher Meek, Ahmed Awadallah, Jianfeng Gao.
In Proc. of the Neural Information Processing Systems Track on Datasets and Benchmarks (NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks), 2021.
Dialogue State Tracking with a Language Model using Schema-Driven Prompting [Code]
Chia-Hsuan Lee, Hao Cheng, Mari Ostendorf.
In Proc. Conf. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021.
Domain-Specific Pretraining for Vertical Search: Case Study on Biomedical Literature
Yu Wang*, Jinchao Li*, Tristan Naumann*, Chenyan Xiong, Hao Cheng, Robert Tinn, Cliff Wong, Naoto Usuyama, Richard Rogahn, Zhihong Shen, Yang Qin, Eric Horvitz, Paul N. Bennett, Jianfeng Gao, and Hoifung Poon. [*Equal contribution]
In Proc. of the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (KDD '21)
UnitedQA: A Hybrid Approach for Open Domain Question Answering [Code]
Hao Cheng*, Yelong Shen*, Xiaodong Liu, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Jianfeng Gao. [*Equal contribution]
In Proc. Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021.
Posterior Differential Regularization with f-divergence for Improving Model Robustness [Code]
Hao Cheng, Xiaodong Liu, Lis Pereira, Yaoliang Yu, Jianfeng Gao.
In Proc. Conf. of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), 2021.
Targeted Adversarial Training for Natural Language Understanding
Lis Pereira*, Xiaodong Liu*, Hao Cheng, Hoifung Poon, Jianfeng Gao, Ichiro Kobayashi.
In Proc. Conf. of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), 2021. [*Equal contribution]
Domain-Specific Language Model Pretraining for Biomedical Natural Language Processing
Yu Gu*, Robert Tinn*, Hao Cheng*, Michael Lucas, Naoto Usuyama, Xiaodong Liu, Tristan Naumann, Jianfeng Gao, Hoifung Poon. 2021 [*Equal contribution]
ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
[2020]
Probabilistic Assumptions Matter: Improved Models for Distantly-Supervised Document-Level Question Answering [Code]
Hao Cheng, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, Kristina Toutanova.
In Proc. Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2020
The microsoft toolkit of multi-task deep neural networks for natural language understanding
Xiaodong Liu, Yu Wang, Jianshu Ji, Hao Cheng, Xueyun Zhu, Emmanuel Awa, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Hoifung Poon, Guihong Cao, Jianfeng Gao.
In Proc. Assoc. for Computational Linguistics (ACL), demo, 2020
Adversarial training for large neural language models
Xiaodong Liu, Hao Cheng, Pengcheng He, Weizhu Chen, Yu Wang, Hoifung Poon, Jianfeng Gao. 2020
[Selected Before 2020]:
A Dynamic Speaker Model for Conversational Interactions [Code]
Hao Cheng, Hao Fang, Mari Ostendorf.
In Proc. Conf. of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), 2019.
Sounding Board: A User-Centric and Content-Driven Social Chatbot
Hao Fang, Hao Cheng, Maarten Sap, Elizabeth Clark, Ari Holtzman, Yejin Choi, Noah A Smith, Mari Ostendorf.
In Proc. Conf. of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL-HLT), demo, 2018.
Bi-directional Attention with Agreement for Dependency Parsing [Code]
Hao Cheng, Hao Fang, Xiaodong He, Jianfeng Gao, Li Deng.
In Proc. Conf. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2016.
Scalable and Sound Low-Rank Tensor Learning [Code]
Hao Cheng, Yaoliang Yu, Xinhua Zhang, Eric Xing, Dale Schuurmans.
In Proc. Conf. Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2016.
Open-Domain Name Error Detection using a Multi-Task RNN.
Hao Cheng, Hao Fang, Mari Ostendorf.
In Proc. Conf. Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2015.
Code
Teaching @ UW
[Instructor][Grad] E596/LING: 580 Conversational AI (course webpage) [Spring 2019]
[TA][Grad] E596/LING 580: Conversational AI (course webpage) [Spring 2018]
[TA] [Grad] EE511: Introduction to Statistical Learning (course webpage) [Winter 2018]
[TA] [Undergrad] EE 235: Continuous-time Linear Systems [Autumn 2017]
[TA] [Undergrad] EE 341: Discrete-Time Linear Systems [Spring 2016]