Research Statement (Quite long, please read.)

The three constant themes of my research are Language, Interaction, and Embodiment from a scalable and cognitive angle. My current research focus is two-fold:

Grounding and alignment: connecting language to everything non-linguistics.
  • I (mostly) agree with Freda Shi's view on the definition of grounding, and grounding != alignment. We wrote something on alignment, and I will find some time to put down my thoughts on the difference between alignment and grounding (TODO list +1)..
  • Grounding language to the physical world: Understanding and generating language that is grounded to sensorimotor experiences and physical situations. There are more to look at beyond 2D grounding, e.g., video, 3D, generative world models.
  • Grounding language to human interactions: (Co-)situated Human-AI interaction in shared environment with disparate mental states, and collaborations towards a common ground.
  • Alignment in post-training and at inference time: Human-like planning and reasoning that is deliberate, (inter)active, lifelong, and steerable upon pre-trained systems.
  • Applications of frontier models in situated/embodied agents as well as content generation.
Scalable (data-driven but sufficiently efficient learning of) representations as computational abstractions of cognition.
  • Scaling law and developmental psychology: Exploring the developmental trajectories of data-driven models and the emergent cognitive capabilities over the course of development.
  • Efficient learning with minimal supervision: Learning that is data-efficient, over multiple modalities, on (semi-)structured data.
  • I (mostly) agree with Alex Warstadt and Samuel Bowman's view on What Artificial Neural Networks Can Tell Us About Human Language Acquisition.
  • Cross-cultural and cross-lingual conventions of cognition. (Languages are dying! Under-represented languages are dear to my heart but I plan (try hard) not to do (too much) research on this topic before I finish my PhD lol)

    • Breakdown and Connections

    This is how I perceive the connections between the pieces.

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    Acknowledgement: Thanks to Jiayuan Mao for this amazing template!!

    Get In Touch

    You are welcome to drop me a message :)

    • Phone

      xxx-xxx-xxxx

    • marstin0607

    • ziqiao_ma

    • Address

      Bob and Betty Beyster Building 4909,
      2260 Hayward Street,
      Ann Arbor, MI 48109.