Jia-Chen Gu (顾佳宸)

About Me

I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), hosted by Prof. Nanyun (Violet) Peng and Prof. Kai-Wei Chang. I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2022, under the supervision of Prof. Zhen-Hua Ling. I have previously interned at Microsoft (2020-2021) and visited Queen’s University (2019-2020). I fortunately received the Best Paper Honorable Mention Award of ACL 2023 and Best Paper Award of DialDoc@ACL 2022.

My primary research interests lie within machine learning for natural language processing, particularly the techniques that can potentially build Trustworthy and Efficient AI. A list of topics that I am actively working on:

• Retrieval-Augmented Language Models to augment the capabilities of given large language models (LLMs) and scale down the size of LLMs via retrieval from knowledge indexes. Recent work: [BRIEF-Pro], [Self-Routing RAG], [CRAG], [TemMed-Bench], [MRAG-Bench, ICLR 2025], [Sparse-RAG, ICLR 2025], [BRIEF, Findings of NAACL 2025], [SyncCheck, EMNLP 2024], [TEGTOK, Findings of ACL 2022], [SPD, EMNLP 2021], [Partner Knowledge, SIGIR 2021], [FIRE, Findings of EMNLP 2020], [DIM, EMNLP 2019].
• Model Editing to reduce the cost of upgrading LLMs and enable data-efficient alterations to the behavior of LLMs, while ensuring no adverse impact on other inputs. Recent work: [SPHERE], [Reversal Editing], [KnowEdit], [UltraEdit], [EditAttack, AAAI 2026], [CaKE, EMNLP 2025], [PRUNE, ICLR 2025], [RECT, EMNLP 2024], [PEAK, ICML 2024].
• Representation Learning with Weak Supervision in the context of dialogue systems: [MADNet, EMNLP 2023], [GIFT, ACL 2023], [HeterMPC, ACL 2022], [MPC Survey, IJCAI 2022], [MPC-BERT, ACL 2021], [SA-BERT, CIKM 2020], [U2U-IMN, TASLP 2020], [IMN, CIKM 2019].

If you are interested in talking about research and life with me, please feel free to reach out.

News

• 2025.10: Check out our latest work on long-context RAG compression [BRIEF-Pro], robust model editing [SPHERE], medical multi-modal RAG [TemMed-Bench], and LLM REViewer Re-EValuation [LLM-REVal].

Experience & Education

• 2023 - Present: Postdoctoral Researcher at UCLA, hosted by Prof. Nanyun (Violet) Peng and Prof. Kai-Wei Chang.
• 2022 - 2023: Postdoctoral Researcher at USTC, hosted by Prof. Zhen-Hua Ling.
• 2020 - 2021: Research Intern at Microsoft, hosted by Dr. Chongyang Tao and Dr. Daxin Jiang.
• 2019 - 2020: Visiting Student at Queen's University, hosted by Prof. Xiaodan Zhu.
• 2017 - 2022: Ph.D. Degree at USTC, supervised by Prof. Zhen-Hua Ling.
• 2013 - 2017: B.E. Degree at Hohai University.

Selected Honors

• 2025   Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research Nomination Award, UCLA
• 2023   Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, ACL
• 2022   Best Paper Award, DialDoc@ACL
• 2022   Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Nomination Award, Chinese Information Processing Society of China
• 2022   Presidential Scholarship, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Top 1%)
• 2022   Outstanding Graduate Award, USTC
• 2021   China National Scholarship, Ministry of Education
• 2021   Huayu Scholarship, NERC-SLIP (Top 2 graduates)
• 2015   Presidential Yan Kai Scholarship, Hohai University (Highest honor Top 0.1%)

Tutorials

• "Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models" at IJCAI 2024.
Ningyu Zhang, Jia-Chen Gu, Yunzhi Yao, Mengru Wang, Xiang Chen, Shumin Deng.
• "Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models" at AAAI 2024. [slides]
Ningyu Zhang, Jia-Chen Gu, Yunzhi Yao, Zhen Bi, Shumin Deng.
• "Learning WHO Saying WHAT to WHOM in Multi-Party Conversations" at IJCNLP-AACL 2023. [slides]
Jia-Chen Gu, Zhuosheng Zhang, Zhen-Hua Ling.
• "Learning WHO Saying WHAT to WHOM in Multi-Party Conversations" at CCKS 2023.
Jia-Chen Gu.

Invited Talks

• 2025.04: "Self-Routing RAG: Binding Selective Retrieval with Knowledge Verbalization" at MLNLP.
• 2024.08: "Measuring and Mitigating Perturbations of Knowledge Editing on Large Language Models" at CAS-ICT.
• 2023.09: "Learning Conversation Structures for Multi-Party Conversations" at MLNLP 2023.
• 2023.05: "Learning Conversation Structures for Multi-Party Conversations" at YSSNLP 2023.
• 2022.11: "Multi-Party Conversation Understanding and Generation" at CCF and CAS-ICT.
• 2022.07: "Multi-Party Conversation Understanding and Generation" at MLNLP. [slides]

Lectures

• 2025.10: Guest lecture "Linear Regression & Multi-Class Classification" at UCLA CM146.
• 2025.04: Guest lecture "Towards Trustworthy and Efficient Retrieval-Augmented Generations" at CUHK-Shenzhen.
• 2024.07: Instructor of "Generative AI" at UCLA Summer Institute CS97.
• 2024.02: Guest lecture "Pre-trained Large Language Models" at UCLA CS162.
• 2023.12: Guest lecture "Multi-Party Conversational AI" at Zhejiang University. [slides]

Shared Tasks

• 2022   Rank first on both subtasks of Track 2 in the Eleventh Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC 11).
• 2020   Rank second under objective metrics and fourth under subjective metrics on Track 1 in the Ninth Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC 9), as the team leader.
• 2019   Rank first, first, third and fourth on subtasks of Track 2 in the Eighth Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC 8), as the first author.
• 2018   Rank second on a subtask of Track 1 in the Seventh Dialog System Technology Challenges (DSTC 7), as the first author.

Professional Service

• Area Chair:
  • ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS
• Program Committee (Reviewer):
  • Conference: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, EACL, ACL Rolling Review, ICLR, COLM, AAAI, IJCAI, NLPCC, CCKS
  • Journal: TASLP, TOIS, TALLIP, CIM, IPM, CL, SPL