Tongyao Zhu

I am a PhD student in the National University of Singapore (NUS) WING Lab and Sea AI Lab, with research interests in LLMs and information retrieval. I am fortunately supervised by Prof Kan Min-Yen from NUS and Dr Liu Qian from Sea AI Lab.

I am generally interested in (1) how knowledge is acquired, processed, and used by language models, as well as (2) the intersection between information retrieval and LLMs 🤔. I am recently working on projects related to retrieval and pretraining.

Prior to my PhD study, I graduated with my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from NUS in 2021, after which I worked as a machine learning engineer at the chatbot team in Shopee for one and half years. I enjoy mountain hiking ⛰️, playing badminton 🏸️, and classical music 🎵.

🔥 News

• [2024-05] 🎉🎉 Our work “Beyond Memorization: The Challenge of Random Memory Access in Language Models” has been accepted by ACL 2024 (oral)!
• [2024-03] ⬆️ I passed my PhD Qualifying Examination, and become a PhD candidate!
• [2023-01] 🏫 I am back to the National University of Singapore (NUS) as a PhD student.

📖 Publications

Tongyao Zhu, Qian Liu, Liang Pang, Zhengbao Jiang, Min-Yen Kan, Min Lin (2024). Beyond Memorization: The Challenge of Random Memory Access in Language Models. (ACL 2024, oral)

Lizi Liao, Tongyao Zhu, Le Hong Long, Tat Seng Chua (2021). Multi-domain Dialogue State Tracking with Recursive Inference. (WWW 2021)

📄 Preprints

Yaqi Xie, Chen Yu, Tongyao Zhu, Jinbin Bai, Ze Gong, Harold Soh (2023). Translating Natural Language to Planning Goals with Large-Language Models.

🏆 Awards

• 2019-2021: USP Honour Roll, Senior Honour Roll, President’s Honour Roll, University Scholars Programme
• 2019, 2020: Dean’s List, School of Computing, NUS
• 2016: NUS Science & Technology Undergraduate Scholarship (SM2)

🎓 Education

• 2023.1-Present: Ph.D in Computer Science, National University of Singapore
• 2017.8-2021.5: Bachelor of Computing (Highest Distinction) in CS, National University of Singapore