Contact

Email: xiusic [AT] illinois [DOT] edu
Office: 4101 Siebel Center for Computer Science, 201 N. Goodwin Ave, Urbana, IL 61801

Bio

I am a postdoctoral research fellow in Blender Lab at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), working with Prof. Heng Ji. My research mainly aims at improving reasoning, alignment, and decision-making of Large Language Models (LLMs).

I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), advised by Prof. Wei Wang. Before UCLA, I got my M.S. and B.S. in Computer Science from Peking University, advised by Prof. Jun Gao. I also worked with Prof. ChengXiang Zhai at UIUC for a wonderful summer. During Ph.D., I spent two summers at Amazon Science and one summer at NEC Labs America.

I played for Peking University Men’s Basketball Varsity Team, Division II, during college.

My CV is available here. My pronouns are He/Him/His.

Research Interests

My ultimate research goal is to build automated language agents that can assist human in a variety of domains. To achieve this goal, I worked on:

• Large Language Models, especially low-resource LLM reasoning (ACL’24, ICML’24a, ICLR’25a, COLM’24, SDM’23, WSDM’24) and alignment (NAACL’24);
• NLP Applications, especially in AI for Science, IR and recommendation (EMNLP’24, ICML’24b, CIKM’22a, Amazon Reviews’23 dataset);
• Complex Dynamics Modeling and Decision Making, especially the planning tasks in sports domain (CIKM’22b, CIKM’24, ICLR’25b, Arxiv’24, Arxiv’25).

To junior Ph.D./master/undergraduate students: If you would like to chat about your career plan or research ideas related to my research interests, please email me to schedule a meeting. I will dedicate 30 minutes to each meeting weekly. I encourage students from underrepresented groups to reach out and will prioritize these meetings.

Invited Talks

Oct 2024      Talk at UIUC-NLP about LLM Reasoning & Alignment
July 2024     Talk at UCSD CSE about LLM Reasoning & Alignment

Selected Publications [Full List]

(“*” marks equal contribution.)

MinPrompt: Graph-based Minimal Prompt Data Augmentation for Few-shot Question Answering
Xiusi Chen, Jyun-Yu Jiang, Wei-Cheng Chang, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Hsiang-Fu Yu and Wei Wang
ACL 2024
[code]

IterAlign: Iterative Constitutional Alignment of Large Language Models
Xiusi Chen, Hongzhi Wen, Sreyashi Nag, Chen Luo, Qingyu Yin, Ruirui Li, Zheng Li, Wei Wang
NAACL 2024
[code]

PlayBest: Professional Basketball Player Behavior Synthesis via Planning with Diffusion
Xiusi Chen, Wei-Yao Wang, Ziniu Hu, David Reynoso, Kun Jin, Mingyan Liu, P. Jeffrey Brantingham, Wei Wang
CIKM 2024
[code]

A Comprehensive Survey of Scientific Large Language Models and Their Applications in Scientific Discovery
Yu Zhang*, Xiusi Chen*, Bowen Jin*, Sheng Wang, Shuiwang Ji, Wei Wang, Jiawei Han
EMNLP 2024
[repo]
550+ stars on GitHub

Beyond Answers: Transferring Reasoning Capabilities to Smaller LLMs Using Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation
Yijun Tian*, Yikun Han*, Xiusi Chen*, Wei Wang, Nitesh V. Chawla
WSDM 2025
[code]

Gotta: Generative Few-shot Question Answering by Prompt-based Cloze Data Augmentation
Xiusi Chen, Yu Zhang, Jinliang Deng, Jyun-Yu Jiang and Wei Wang
SDM 2023
[code]
Best Poster Award (Honorable Mention), Regular Paper

Scalable Graph Representation Learning via Locality-Sensitive Hashing
Xiusi Chen, Jyun-Yu Jiang and Wei Wang
CIKM 2022
[code]

ReLiable: Offline Reinforcement Learning for Tactical Strategies in Professional Basketball Games
Xiusi Chen, Jyun-Yu Jiang, Kun Jin, Yichao Zhou, Mingyan Liu, Jefferey Brantingham and Wei Wang
CIKM 2022
[code]

Large Scale Knowledge Washing
Yu Wang, Ruihan Wu, Zexue He, Xiusi Chen, Julian McAuley
ICLR 2025
[code]

Self-Updatable Large Language Models with Parameter Integration
Yu Wang, Xinshuang Liu, Xiusi Chen, Sean O’Brien, Junda Wu, Julian McAuley
ICLR 2025
[code]

Strategist: Learning Strategic Skills by LLMs via Bi-Level Tree Search
Jonathan Light, Min Cai, Weiqin Chen, Guanzhi Wang, Xiusi Chen, Wei Cheng, Yisong Yue, Ziniu Hu
ICLR 2025
[code][project page]

Towards LifeSpan Cognitive Systems
Yu Wang, Chi Han, Tongtong Wu, Xiaoxin He, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nafis Sadeq, Xiusi Chen, Zexue He, Wei Wang, Gholamreza Haffari, Heng Ji, Julian McAuley
TMLR 2025

Chain-of-Factors Paper-Reviewer Matching
Yu Zhang, Yanzhen Shen, SeongKu Kang, Xiusi Chen, Bowen Jin, Jiawei Han
WWW 2025
[code]

SemiEvol: Semi-supervised Fine-tuning for LLM Adaptation
Junyu Luo, Xiao Luo, Xiusi Chen, Zhiping Xiao, Wei Ju, Ming Zhang
NAACL 2025 (Findings)
[code]

MemoryLLM: Toward Self-Updating Large Language Models
Yu Wang, Yifan Gao, Xiusi Chen, Haoming Jiang, Shiyang Li, Jingfeng Yang, Qingyu Yin, Zheng Li, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Jingbo Shang, Julian McAuley
ICML 2024
[code]

Language Models as Semantic Indexers
Bowen Jin, Hansi Zeng, Guoyin Wang, Xiusi Chen, Tianxin Wei, Ruirui Li, Zhengyang Wang, Zheng Li, Yang Li, Hanqing Lu, Suhang Wang, Jiawei Han, Xianfeng Tang
ICML 2024
[code]

TPD: Enhancing Student Language Model Reasoning via Principle Discovery and Guidance
Haorui Wang, Rongzhi Zhang, Yinghao Li, Lingkai Kong, Yuchen Zhuang, Xiusi Chen, Chao Zhang
COLM 2024

Bridging Language and Items for Retrieval and Recommendation (Amazon Reviews 2023)
Yupeng Hou*, Jiacheng Li*, Zhankui He, An Yan, Xiusi Chen, Julian McAuley
ArXiv 2024
[code][website][huggingface]
150+ stars on Github
400k+ downloads on HuggingFace

EscapeBench: Pushing Language Models to Think Outside the Box
Cheng Qian, Peixuan Han, Qinyu Luo, Bingxiang He, Xiusi Chen, Yuji Zhang, Hongyi Du, Jiarui Yao, Xiaocheng Yang, Denghui Zhang, Yunzhu Li, Heng Ji
ArXiv 2024
[code]

Weakly Supervised Multi-Label Classification of Full-Text Scientific Papers
Yu Zhang, Bowen Jin, Xiusi Chen, Yanzhen Shen, Yunyi Zhang, Yu Meng, and Jiawei Han
KDD 2023
[code]

MotifClass: Weakly Supervised Text Classification with Higher-order Metadata Information
Yu Zhang*, Shweta Garg*, Yu Meng, Xiusi Chen and Jiawei Han
WSDM 2022
[code]

Hierarchical Metadata-Aware Document Categorization under Weak Supervision
Yu Zhang, Xiusi Chen, Yu Meng, Jiawei Han
WSDM 2021
[code]

Academic Service

Conference Program Committee
KDD 2020-2025; WSDM 2022-2025; WWW 2024; SSL@WWW 2021;
ICML 2023-2024; NeurIPS 2022-2024; ICLR 2022-2024; AAAI 2021-2024; IJCAI-ECAI 2022-2023;
ACL Rolling Review

Conference Subreviewer
KDD 2018, CIKM 2018, WISE 2018, IJCAI 2019

Journal Reviewer
IEEE Transactions on Big Data (TBD).

Honors and Awards

2023 Best Poster Award (Honorable Mention), SDM 2023
2023 SIAM Student Travel Award, SIAM
2021, 2022 SIGIR Student Travel Grant, ACM SIGIR
2016, 2017 Graduate Student Acedemic Scholarship, Peking University
2016 Leo KoGuan Scholarshop, Peking University
2016 Merit Student, Peking University
2014 3rd Place of 17th Chinese University Basketball Association (CUBA) Championships, Beijing Division, Federation of University Sports of China

Miscellaneous

I played for Peking University Men’s Basketball varsity team, division II.
I was a registered swimming athlete in China during high school.
I was born and raised in Changsha, Hunan, China.