I am a researcher at Microsoft Research, collaborating with Hoifung Poon. My research focuses on multimodal machine learning for clinical diagnosis and precision health.

Research

My research focuses on AI for healthcare. I am interested in applying machine learning to various modalities, such as brain MRI and chest X-ray, to predict radiologic, pathologic, and oncologic findings. My work focuses on real-world evidence derived from electronic health records, which is often heterogeneous and unstructured. I am interested in curating such data at scale and using it to define and solve clinically meaningful research problems.

Meanwhile, I do data analysis for biology problems, collaborating with researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine Institute and Stanford University and publishing biology papers.

In the past, I worked on efficient language modeling (thesis topic), semantic parsing, prompting (the best short paper in NAACL 2021), time-series analysis, and grounded language acquisition.

A full list of papers can be found in publications.

Engineering

I enjoy implementing and optimizing machine learning algorithms and working with large-scale data. I contributed to PyTorch Lightning and Radiology Report Generation Metrics.

I am also known as hiaoxui, the founder and major maintainer of WallessPKU, a non-profit anti-censorship project that helps Chinese students and researchers to circumvent the Great Firewall. Since 2017, it has been serving more than 64,000 scholars from 200+ institutions.

Education & Experience

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2024 from Johns Hopkins University, advised by Benjamin Van Durme with my thesis on natural language processing. I obtained my B.S. in Physics and Computer Science from Peking University in 2019.

I joined Microsoft as a researcher in 2024. I previously interned at Microsoft several times (2017 in Beijing, 2022 and 2023 in Redmond). I was a visiting student at Johns Hopkins University in 2018, mentored by Jason Eisner.

Honors

• Outstanding Reviewer for EMNLP 2019, NeurIPS 2025, and ICML 2026.
• Best Short Paper Award at NAACL 2021. [the paper↗]
• Silver Medalist in Chinese Physics Olympiad (CPhO) in 2014.

Academic Service

I serve as an area chair for NeurIPS (2026) and as a reviewer for NeurIPS (2019–2023 and 2025), ICLR (2019–2021 and 2023–2026), ICML (2020, 2021, and 2026), CVPR (2026), ACL (2021 and 2025), EMNLP (2019–2022 and 2026), NAACL (2024), AAAI (2021), and AKBC (2020)

Teaching & Mentoring

I was a TA for Machine Learning (CS 601.475) at Johns Hopkins University in 2022. I have also mentored:

• Jiachen Tu, research intern at Microsoft Research, 2025. Now Ph.D. student at UIUC.
• Vivek Chari, undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University, 2023. Now Scientist at Microsoft.
• Yukun Feng, master's student at Johns Hopkins University, 2022. Now Scientist at Apple.