About Me
Hi! I'm a PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, co-advised by Mrinmaya Sachan and Antoine Bosselut. Before ETH Zurich, I got my MPhil degree in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at CUHK, co-advised by Ming-Chang Yang and James Cheng, and my Bachelor degree in the Advanced Class in Mathematics and Physics at HUST.
Research Philosophy
I am broadly interested in research topics related to model interpretation, reasoning, and knowledge enhancement.
Specifically, I am devoted to understanding how current large models work, i.e., if/how they acquire/use different types of knowledge/skill. Based on the insights, I contribute to exploring how to improve existing models and how to use them wisely.
Selected Publications
Full list can be found in Google Scholar.
- Do Vision-Language Models Really Understand Visual Language?
Buse Giledereli*, Yifan Hou*, Yilei Tu, Mrinmaya Sachan.
Manuscript
[paper] [code (coming soon)] - What Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis
Jiaoda Li*, Yifan Hou*, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ryan Cotterell.
ACL 2024
[paper] [code] - Towards a Mechanistic Interpretation of Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models
Yifan Hou, Jiaoda Li, Yu Fei, Alessandro Stolfo, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guangtao Zeng, Antoine Bosselut, Mrinmaya Sachan.
EMNLP 2023
[paper] [code] [poster] - Adapters for Enhanced Modeling of Multilingual Knowledge and Text
Yifan Hou, Wenxiang Jiao, Meizhen Liu, Carl Allen, Zhaopeng Tu, Mrinmaya Sachan.
EMNLP 2022 (Findings)
Best Paper at MRL Workshop
[paper] [code] [slides] - What Has Been Enhanced in my Knowledge-Enhanced Language Model?
Yifan Hou, Guoji Fu, Mrinmaya Sachan.
EMNLP 2022 (Findings)
[paper] [code] - Bird's Eye: Probing for Linguistic Graph Structures with a Simple Information-Theoretic Approach
Yifan Hou, Mrinmaya Sachan.
ACL 2021
[paper] [code]
My Service
Reviewer: ICML, ACL, NeurIPS, EMNLP, ICLR
Experience
- Summer intern at TTIC in 2020
Project: Extracting and analyzing the structured multimodal information on webpages
Advisor: Mrinmaya Sachan - Summer intern at NUS in 2019
Project: Analysis of graph neural networks based on information theory
Advisor: Richard T. B. Ma - Summer exchange at UIUC in 2017
Project: Data analysis with social networks on Gephi
Selected Awards
Several representative awards are listed below.
| Year | Award |
|---|---|
| 2022 | Best Paper Award (MRL Workshop) |
| 2022 | Outstanding Reviewer (ICML) |
| 2022 | SDSC Ph.D. Fellowship (SDSC) |
| 2020 | Faculty Outstanding MPhil Thesis Award (CUHK) |
| 2019 | Student Travel Award (KDD) |
| 2018 | Outstanding Graduates Awards (HUST) |
| 2016 | China National Scholarship (HUST) |