Zhaotian Weng

Hi! I am a first-year master's student in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, working with Professor Jieyu Zhao and Professor Kuan-Hao Huang. My research interests lie in Natural Language Processing (NLP), with a particular focus on trustworthy NLP, multimodal models, and NLP for social good.

Before coming to USC, I graduated with honors from Tsinghua University as an outstanding undergraduate.

Publications

Images Speak Louder than Words: Understanding and Mitigating Bias in Vision-Language Model from a Causal Mediation Perspective
Zhaotian Weng, Zijun Gao, Jerone Andrews, Jieyu Zhao. EMNLP 2024.

Towards More Accurate US Presidential Election via Multi-step Reasoning with Large Language Models
Chenxiao Yu, Zhaotian Weng, Xiyang Hu, Yue Zhao. SSRN preprint. SoCal NLP Symposium 2024.

BIASINSPECTOR: Detecting Bias in Structured Data through LLM Agents
Haoxuan Li, Mingyu Derek Ma, Jen-tse Huang, Zhaotian Weng, Wei Wang, Jieyu Zhao. Arxiv preprint.

Online Open-set Semi-supervised Object Detection with Dual Competing Head
Zerun Wang, Ling Xiao, Liuyu Xiang, Zhaotian Weng, Toshihiko Yamasaki. under review at Neurocomputing.

LLM Self-contradictory Hallucination Mitigation via Retrieval-Based Post-Processing
Zhaotian Weng, Xingjian Dong, Liyan Huang, Jingwen Qi. SoCal NLP Symposium 2024.
Representation learning with CGAN for causal inference
Zhaotian Weng, Jiannbo Hong, Lan Wang. CONF-SPML2023
What’s Missing in Vision-Language Models? Probing Their Struggles with Causal Order Reasoning
Zhaotian Weng, Haoxuan Li, Jieyu Zhao, Kuan-Hao Huang. in preparation for ACL 2025
Evaluating and Improving Context-aware Privacy Protection in Vison-Language Models
Zhaotian Weng, Haoxuan Li, Jieyu Zhao. in preparation for ACL 2025

Select Awards

Outstanding Undergraduate Graduate Honor, Tsinghua University, 2023
Scientific Research Excellence Award Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2022
Sports Excellence Award Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2022
1st prize in the National College Students Physics Competition, 2020
Academic Excellence Award Scholarship, Tsinghua University, 2020
Honorable Mention in MCM2022.
1st prize in the Tsinghua University Software Development Competition 2022
National First Prize, Chinese Physics Olympiad (CPhO), 2017, which granted me direct admission to Tsinghua University.

Education

University of Southern California, MS in Computer Science 2023.08-2025.05

GPA: 4.0/4.o

Tsinghua University, Bachelor' degree, Software Engineering 2023

Outstanding Undergraduate Graduate Honor, Tsinghua University, 2023

Activities and Services

Conference Reviewer

EMNLP 2024 June reviewer, ARR 2024 August, Octobor, December reviewer.

Conference volunteer

EMNLP 2024 volunteer

Teaching

Course Producer of CSCI 585 Database Systems, 2024 fall, University of Southern California.