About: The UNITES Lab focuses on building accurate, trustworthy, and efficient machine learning systems for AI and scientific applications.
Director: Dr. Tianlong Chen, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at UNC Chapel Hill
Research Areas: Efficient Deep Learning, Trustworthy AI, AI for Science, Large Language Models, Computer Vision
We are actively recruiting PhD students, postdocs, and interns. Interested candidates are strongly encouraged to contact Dr. Chen by email.
[Sep. 2025]
Dr. Chen received the Amazon Research Award for Spring 2025
[Aug. 2025]
Dr. Chen received a gift funding from Cisco Research
UNITES welcomes 11 new members (8 Ph.D. + 2 Postdoc + 1 M.S.): Mohan Zhang (USTC), Yuhang Cheng (Wuhan University), Kangqi Ni (RICE), Laura Yao (CMU), Yu-Chao Huang (National Taiwan University), Zijie Liu (WashU), Zhuoxuan Zhang (Brown), Shuqing Luo (PKU), Jinhao Duan (Drexel), Gengwei Zhang (UTS), and Zhen Xu (Zhejiang University)
9 EMNLP'25 (6 Main + 3 Findings) accepted - Next Agent Prediction, Embodied Reward Model, Bit Flip Error Resilience in LLMs, Instruction-Driven Routing for MoE, Adaptive Resolution for VLLMs, MedHallucinations Benchmark, and more
[Jul. 2025]
1 COLM'25 accepted - Multi-model Safety Alignment
[Jun. 2025]
NeurIPS'25 Workshop accepted - Lock-LLM. Call for Papers!
[May 2025]
10 ACL'25 (5 Main + 5 Findings) accepted - Long-term Personalized Dialogue Agents (Integrated in Google Gemini), Indirect Attack in Multi-Agent Systems, UQ in LLM, Efficient LLM Recommender, Multi-Agent System for Content Analysis, Multi-omics Foundation Model, and more
1 JBI'25 accepted - Personalized Graph Learning on EHRs
2 KDD'25 accepted - Graph Learning w. Missing Features + Trustworthy LLM Agent (Survey + Tutorial)
4 ICML'25 accepted - Communication Topology Designs in Multi-Agent System (Spotlight), New MoE Parallelism, Adaptive Multimodal Learning, Interpretable MoE
Dr. Chen received the Amazon Research Award for Fall 2024
Congratulations to Mohan Zhang, Pingzhi Li, and collaborators for winning the low-resource methods for NLP SAC Award at NAACL 2025
[Mar. 2025]
Dr. Chen received the NAIRR Pilot Award in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Systems
[Jan. 2025]
4 NAACL'25 papers accepted on MoE Efficiency, LLM Alignment, LLM-Guided Conversation, and Jailbreak Defense
6 ICLR'25 papers accepted including work on LLM Model Patches, Multi-Agent Communication, and Multimodal Learning
Dr. Chen received the 2025 CPAL Rising Star Award and 2025 KAUST Rising Stars Award
Dr. Chen received the AAAI New Faculty Highlights 2025
Dr. Chen received a gift funding from Cisco Research
[Dec. 2024]
Congratulations to Xinyu Zhao and collaborators for winning the Best Demo Paper Award at GenAI4Health at NeurIPS 2024
6 AAAI'25 papers accepted on Metacognitive AI, Visual Prompting, Brain Pathway Learning, and Uncertainty Quantification
Two ICLR'25 Workshops and One PAKDD'25 Workshop accepted on Sparsity in LLM and Scalable Optimization
[Nov. 2024]
One KDD'25 paper accepted on C2C Recommendation Datasets (ADS Track)
[Oct. 2024]
Four NeurIPS'24 papers accepted including work on Flexible Modality Learning (Spotlight), Game-Theoretic Evaluation for LLM Reasoning, and Graph Learning
[Sep. 2024]
Three EMNLP'24 papers accepted on LLM RAG Vulnerabilities, FFN-SkipLLM, and Calibration LLM Pruning
Two EMNLP'24 Findings papers accepted on Synergized KG and LLM for AD and Cross-Lingual Multi-Hop Knowledge Editing
[Aug. 2024]
UNITES Lab welcomes six new Ph.D. students: Sukwon Yun (KAIST), Xinyu Zhao (Peking University), Pingzhi Li (USTC), Mufan Qiu (USTC), Huaizhi Qu (USTC), and Rana Muhammad Shahroz Khan (Vanderbilt)
[Jul. 2024]
Two ECCV'24 papers accepted on Multiplexed Immunofluorescence Image Analysis and Facial Affective Behavior Analysis
Congratulations to Sukwon Yun for his first 1st author ECCV paper
Dr. Chen started his Assistant Professor position at CS@UNC Chapel Hill
[May 2024]
Six ICML'24 papers accepted on ZO LLM Tuning, Graph Sparsification, Reliable SMoE, Biological-informed Protein Representation Learning, Sparse Cocktail, and TrustLLM
One Bioinformatics paper accepted on scRNA Imputation via Bi-level Feature Propagation
Tutorial on "Mixture-of-Experts in the Era of LLMs: A New Odyssey" accepted by ICML'24
[Mar. 2024]
One NAACL'24 paper accepted on Multiple LLM Agents Gaming
Two CVPR'24 papers accepted on Diffusion Quantization and Molecular Data Programming
[Feb. 2024]
Two ICLR'24 papers accepted including SMoE Merging (Spotlight) and Multilingual SMoE
Congratulations to Pingzhi Li and Xinyu Zhao for their first 1st author ICLR papers
Tutorial on "Zeroth-Order Machine Learning" accepted by AAAI'24 and ICASSP'24
One EACL'24 paper accepted on LLM + Knowledge Graph
