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.
Selected Publications
Training Step-Level Reasoning Verifiers with Formal Verification Tools
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]
Recent Talks
Trustworthy and Collaborative LLM Agents
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. May 28, 2025.
Trustworthy Large Language Models for Summarizing Electronic Health Records
- Penn State College of Medicine AI Grand Rounds. March 26, 2025.
Gradient-based Prompt Optimization for LLM Reasoning
- eBay Tech Talk. Dec, 2024.
How Can LLMs Help Peer Review?
- LLM for Science Birds-of-a-Feather. NAACL 2024. June, 2024.
Are Large Language Models Fair Summarizers?
- New Frontiers in Summarization workshop at EMNLP 2023. Dec, 2023.
Trustworthy Human-Centered Summarization
- eBay. June, 2023.
- Cisco. June, 2023.
Semantic Parsing in the Era of Large Language Models
- Penn State CSE Faculty Seminar. Dec, 2022.
- University of Pennsylvania. CLunch - Penn NLP. Oct, 2022.
Contrastive Learning for Natural Language Processing
- Amazon AWS. August, 2022.
- MLNLP Seminar. July, 2022.
- Penn State NSF REU Site: Machine Learning in Cybersecurity. July, 2022.
- The University of Tokyo. July, 2022.
