Vivian Chen

CS PhD Student • UCSD

Profile Photo

Hi, I’m Vivian (Yiwei) Chen, an incoming Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego. I am fortunate enough to be jointly advised by Prof. Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick and Prof. Rose Yu.

Research

My research interests include natural language processing, machine learning, and AI for science. I’m interested in data-efficient modeling, complex reasoning, pragmatics, and low-resource languages. I am also interested in multi-modal foundation models that integrate structured and textual data to advance scientific understanding.

In the past, I've worked with Prof. Kilian Weinberger on diffusion-guided language modeling (Findings, ACL 2024), with Prof. Yoav Artzi on retrospective learning from human feedback in interactions (ACL 2025 Oral), and with Prof. Tanya Goyal on unfactual outputs in large language models.

News

  • 06/2025: Our paper Retrospective Learning from Interactions has been selected for an oral presentation at ACL 2025.
  • 05/2025: I graduated from Cornell with a B.A. in Computer Science, Math, and Linguistics.

Selected Publications

Awards

2025
Jacobs School of Engineering Fellowship, UCSD
2025
Merrill Presidential Scholar, Cornell
2025
Summa Cum Laude Computer Science, Cornell
2025
Phi Beta Kappa Scholarship, Cornell
2023-24
Bowers Undergraduate Research Experience (BURE) Grant
2024
CS Course Staff Exceptional Service Award

Services

Teaching Assistant
  • CS 4782: Introduction to Deep Learning
  • CS 4780: Machine Learning (twice)
  • CS 4740: Natural Language Processing
  • CS 2800: Discrete Structures
  • CS 2802: Honors Discrete Structures
Volunteer
  • Peer Mentor, Women In Computing at Cornell (WICC)
  • Girls Who Code Instructor
  • Translator, Cornell Translator Interpreter Program
  • Staff, INFO 1998: Introduction to Machine Learning (Student-led class)

Miscellaneous

I'm a huge musical theatre fan. I worked for Tony Awards · China as a subtitle translator in 2024.

I like singing, reading, and watching movies. I quite enjoy learning languages, and I'm currently learning Japanese.

For sports, I like skiing and figure skating, and I play table tennis. I will definitely try surfing in San Diego!

I also do a bit of seal cutting in my spare time.