Yekun Chai

Baidu NLP

london.jpg

Contact:
chaiyekun (at) gmail.com

I am a staff engineer at Baidu NLP, where I have contributed to Baidu’s LLM series such as ERNIE 4.0, ERNIE 3.5 and ERNIE-Code, and their industry-driven generative AI products such as ERNIE-Bot (文心一言) and Comate (文心快码). Before that, I honed my skills in RL and NLP at Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. I pursued my academic studies in NLP at University of Edinburgh, where I was fortunate to be supervised by Dr. Adam Lopez and Dr. Naomi Saphra.

My research endeavors revolve around transformers and generative AI, with a particular emphasis on:

  • Pre-training large-scale foundation models across languages, modalities, and tasks.
  • Efficient alignment, reasoning, and inference at scale.
  • Multimodal deep generative models.

news

Sep 21, 2024 Our papers on pixel-based pre-training, training data attribution, and tokenization robustness have been accepted to EMNLP 2024 and Findings. :bear:
May 02, 2024 One paper on GiLOT, an XAI approach for LLMs, has been accepted to ICML 2024. :snowflake:
Feb 20, 2024 One paper on HumanEval-XL, a multilingual code generation benchmark has been accepted to LREC-COLING 2024. We’ve released the code and data.
Jan 16, 2024 One paper on reward models with tool-augmented feedback has been accepted to ICLR 2024 (spotlight):sparkles:. Dive into our research and code now! :fire:
Sep 23, 2023 One paper on XAI has been accepted to NeurIPS 2023 datasets and benchmarks track. Code is available here.

selected publications

  1. EMNLP
    Autoregressive Pre-Training on Pixels and Texts
    Yekun Chai, Qingyi Liu^, Jingwu Xiao^Shuohuan Wang, and 2 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Nov 2024
  2. ICLRSpotlight
    Tool-Augmented Reward Modeling
    Lei Li*^Yekun Chai*†Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, and 3 more authors
    In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations , Nov 2024
  3. ACL-Findings
    ERNIE-Code: Beyond English-Centric Cross-lingual Pretraining for Programming Languages
    Yekun ChaiShuohuan Wang, Chao Pang, Yu Sun, and 2 more authors
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023 , Jul 2023