Hi! I'm Xiaoyan(Elena) Bai

柏 晓琰

I am currectly a first-year PhD student in CS at University of Chicago , advised by Chenhao Tan . I am also a member of Chicago Human+AI lab.

Before that, I earned B.E in Computer Science at CSE at Univeristy of Michigan, Ann Arbor. During my undergrad study, I was honored to be a member of Language and Information Technologies (LIT) lab group to work with Rada Mihalcea. I also worked on NLP inference time efficiency in Atul Prakash's group. I am interested in doing research in Natural Language Processing. At the same time, I like photography and Game Design & Development. Check the games I made!

profile

Research Interest: As machine learning continues to advance, so does the potential for the digital divide and inequality to widen. These issues motivate my research in building transparent, efficient, and more accessible tools for social good. I believe this can be done by building interpretable models or building more cost-efficient methods

Publications

A Mechanistic Understanding of Alignment Algorithms: A Case Study on DPO and Toxicity (ICML, 2024) Oral
Andrew Lee, Xiaoyan Bai, Itamar Pres, Martin Wattenberg, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Rada Mihalcea

Learn To be Efficient: Build Structured Sparsity in Large Language Models (Neurips, 2024) Spotlight
Haizhong Zheng, Xiaoyan Bai, Beidi Chen, Fan Lai, Atul Prakash

Teaching & Work Experience

I am currently a first-year PhD student at University of Chicago.

  • TA for CMSC25300: Mathematical Foundation of Machine Learning (Fall 2024) -- University of Chicago
  • Grader for EECS 376: Foundations of Computer Science (Fall 2023) -- University of Michigan
  • TA for Serious Game and AI (Summer 2023) -- MIT Beaver Works Summer Institute
  • During the winter of 2021, I worked as an intern in Emogent to help develop human-machine interactive product, Irene, who are also considered as a hyper-realistic artificial intelligence.