Assistant Professor @CSatUSC | Previously Visiting Researcher @facebookai | Stanford CS PhD @StanfordNLP

Los Angeles, CA
Joined June 2018
Robin Jia retweeted
Some thoughts on a hard cap on the number of submissions a conference can handle, thereby capping the load on both reviewing and size. This currently is a partially specified mechanism, with the aim of soliciting suggestions. yoavartzi.com/log/peter-pan-…
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Super excited to share our new paper: Reward misspecification degrades chain-of-thought (CoT) monitorability! During RL training, when the model is prompted with one task intent (e.g., response ≤ 900 words) but rewarded for a different or even contradictory behavior (e.g., response > 900 words), the CoT keeps reasoning about the task intent while the output violates it. We also propose a simple mitigation method that requires no prior knowledge of the true reward or the reward hack behavior. 🧵
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A very overdue life update: came across my graduation photos and realized I never shared them! I finished my PhD at @CSatUSC ! 🎓 So grateful to my advisors @robinomial and @_jessethomason_ for all their guidance and support, and to my partner for being there through all the ups and downs. ❤️ I’ve since joined @UCBerkeley as a postdoc, working with @serinachang5! 🐻
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I’ll be at #COLM2026 next week, presenting our work on effective KV-cache eviction at the Efficient Reasoning Workshop on Oct 9, 12:30–13:30. I work on LLM capabilities, efficient reasoning, and evaluation, and would be happy to chat with anyone working on related problems! I’m also looking for Spring/Summer 2027 internships. Feel free to DM me if you think I'd be a good fit.
Introducing VaSE: Value-Aware Stochastic KV Cache Eviction. Reasoning models think in CoT, bloating the KV cache. Eviction caps memory but suffers capability drop. VaSE is a training-free recipe that cuts that cost: keep large-magnitude value states, evict stochastically.
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Coming to COLM next week? The schedule is live at colm.eventhosts.cc/virtual/2… 5 invited talks, a panel discussion, 24 orals, and 856 posters await! This llama will need plenty of coffee to see all that...
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Robin Jia retweeted
Introducing TabFM-Auto, my summer project at @GoogleResearch . LLMs possess rich world knowledge yet bad at handling massive tables with millions of number cells. Tabular Foundation Models are so good at tabular in-context learning but don't have semantic knowledges.
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We have a few spots remaining for social events at COLM! If you're interested in hosting a social, please apply by 10am PT on Friday Oct 2 at forms.gle/qmozegbFu4DwHMzT9W…
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Robin Jia retweeted
We now release the technical report for TabFM: arxiv.org/abs/2609.37959. Together, we introduce TabFM-Auto: an LLM agent working on feature engineering on top of a frozen TabFM. You can find more details at arxiv.org/abs/2609.37989 and explore features LLMs found at deqingfu.github.io/tabfm-aut….
Introducing TabFM, a foundation model designed specifically for tabular data classification & regression. This approach allows generation of high-quality predictions on previously unseen tables in a single forward pass. Learn more and try out the model →goo.gle/4eR7uku
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Robin Jia retweeted
I’ll be at the Bay Area for @COLM_conf next week! I’m on the job market this year and I’ll be presenting 3 posters on: 1️⃣ How different models learn similar number representations. convergent-evolution.github.… 2️⃣ Token-level off-policy learning. arxiv.org/abs/2607.17524 3️⃣ SAEs for Reasoning. arxiv.org/abs/2506.09967
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Robin Jia retweeted
Today’s news that OpenAI hacked the Australian government is not an isolated incident. We’re releasing more than 30,000 logs that include activity from this hack and attempts against previously unknown targets. In this data, we found rogue agent activity stretching back to at least March, two months earlier than was previously known. This activity continues as recently as last week, suggesting it may still be ongoing 🧵 Our blog: transluce.org/agent-activity NYT: nytimes.com/2026/09/23/techn…
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Robin Jia retweeted
Frontier lab CEOs are calling for embedded 3rd party evaluators to help oversee AI risks. But what should third parties actually do within labs? We share some initial thoughts on how embedded evaluators could help avoid incidents like the Hugging Face hack and monitor for future risks 🧵 transluce.org/embedded-evalu…
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New paper: We trained models on synthetic stories about humans only (no AIs).
 We found the Assistant adopts quirky behaviors from the stories in ordinary chat. Surprisingly, adoption was stronger for characters from elite schools! Why does this happen? 🧵
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Robin Jia retweeted
Today, Transluce is releasing the most expansive independent evaluation to date of how AI systems respond to users experiencing mental health crises. We evaluated 77 model variants from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, SpaceXAI, Thinking Machines, DeepSeek and Moonshot AI.
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Robin Jia retweeted
Lately I have been receiving some emails of former undergrad and MS students I mentored 3-4 years ago thanking me for giving them advice to 'not do a phd', 'pre-agi' lol. To be honest, if you are debating a phd and you are not absolutely psyched about doing a phd, you probably shouldn't do it. And this isn't cause of AI takeover yada yada. Phd is a huge commitment that suits ppl with obsession to fully dedicate themselves to something. Same with post phd, if you are on the fence about academia, you probably shouldn't pick it as a career. This being said, I do think we definitely need ppl to do phds, cause we need to have a strong pipeline. if we stop training good researchers, we are doing a huge disservice to the generations that come in 10+ yrs.
I tell a ton of people that getting a PhD is not a good idea for your career, but it’ll likely be far higher in personal growth and fulfillment which is maybe worth way more anyways. I need to think about how to price that in.
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Hi all, surreal moment: the recommendations in our social media regulation paper have been adopted by EU law! The Digital Services Act previously required companies to report the "accuracy" of content moderation systems, and we suggested precision and recall instead.🧵[1/4]
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Robin Jia retweeted
Your (token-level) reward model is also a (better) language model. Teach it to spot bad tokens. It stops writing them. Off-policy LoRA training is very interpretable — as conditional steering. Check out this amazing #COLM2026 work by @ZitongHuang12 and @CtrlVGustavo!
Can training a language model for binary classification improve generation? Surprisingly, yes. We introduce Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL) for faithful generation under distribution shift. Instead of optimizing next-token prediction, we train an LLM to classify whether each generated token is faithful. 🔗 arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2607.17524 🧵👇
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Check out our work on the interesting connections between LoRA, conditional steering, and reward modeling! See yall in sf #COLM2026 🔥🔥🔥
Can training a language model for binary classification improve generation? Surprisingly, yes. We introduce Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL) for faithful generation under distribution shift. Instead of optimizing next-token prediction, we train an LLM to classify whether each generated token is faithful. 🔗 arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2607.17524 🧵👇
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Can training a language model for binary classification improve generation? Surprisingly, yes. We introduce Token-Level Off-Policy Labeling (TOPL) for faithful generation under distribution shift. Instead of optimizing next-token prediction, we train an LLM to classify whether each generated token is faithful. 🔗 arXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2607.17524 🧵👇
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Several people with no technical background told me they submitted to NeurIPS using agents for all coding—stating they didn't understand what the agent did, nor underlying code. Asked how they could trust the code/results, they said they assume reviewers will catch any errors.
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Robin Jia retweeted
🚀The ICML 2026 EMM-QA Workshop is happening tomorrow!🚀 Join us at 8:00 AM in ASEM Ballroom 201 at COEX. The program features four excellent invited talks, paper presentations, shared challenge highlights, and the live AI QA competition! Program: qanta-org.github.io/competit…
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