About Me
Hi! I am Ansong Ni (倪安松), a final-year Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at Yale University working with Prof. Arman Cohan, and (the late) Prof. Dragomir Radev. Prior to Yale, I obtained my M.S. in CS degree from School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and B.Eng. from Nanjing University in China.
I worked as a research intern at Google DeepMind (Summer 2023), Meta AI (Summer 2022), MSR Redmond (Summer 2021), AI2 (Summer 2020), MSR Asia (Summer, Fall 2017).
I will be on the job market starting fall 2023 for industrial research labs & startups.
Research Interest
My current research focus is code generation using large language models (LLMs). More specifically, I am intrigued by the abilities / applications enabled by LLMs trained on code, such as:
- Procedure understanding and reasoning (ICLR’23)
- AI-assisted software development (ICSE’21, MSR’17)
- Tool use and robot control
I am also excited by the various learning problems posted by code LLMs, such as:
- Learning from execution feedback (ICLR’23, ICML’23)
- Neuro-symbolic learning (ICLR’23)
- (inter-)active learning (AAAI’20), Transfer Learning (DL4C’23, ICML’23), Multi-task Learning (EMNLP’22)*
Previously, I have also done research in more traditional NLP tasks, such as question answering (EMNLP’21) and text summarization (EMNLP’21, ACL’22, EMNLP’22). I also led the development of SummerTime (230+ stars) at Yale.
For more details about my research, please refer to my publication list below.
Selected Publications
For a full list, please refer to my Google Scholar or Semantic Scholar.
(* denotes equal contribution)
Ansong Ni, Srini Iyer, Dragomir Radev, Ves Stoyanov, Wen-tau Yih, Sida I. Wang, and Xi Victoria Lin
LEVER: Learning to Verify Language-to-Code Generation with Execution
The 2023 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML’23)
[arxiv] [code]Ansong Ni, Jeevana Priya Inala, Chenglong Wang, Oleksandr Polozov, Christopher Meek, Dragomir Radev, and Jianfeng Gao
Learning Math Reasoning from Self-Sampled Correct and Partially-Correct Solutions
The 2023 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR’23)
[arxiv] [code]Zhangir Azerbayev, Ansong Ni, Hailey Schoelkopf, and Dragomir Radev
Explicit Knowledge Transfer for Weakly-Supervised Code Generation
Deep Learning For Code (DL4C) Workshop @ ICLR’23
[arxiv]Tianbao Xie*, Chen Henry Wu*,…, Ansong Ni,…, Rui Zhang, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Tao Yu
UnifiedSKG: Unifying and Multi-Tasking Structured Knowledge Grounding with Text-to-Text Language Models
The 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP’22)
[arxiv] [website] [code]Ansong Ni, Matt Gardner, and Pradeep Dasigi
Mitigating False-Negative Contexts in Multi-document Question Answering with Retrieval Marginalization
The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP’21)
[arxiv] [code]Ansong Ni, Zhangir Azerbayev, Mutethia Mutuma, Troy Feng, Yusen Zhang, Tao Yu, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, and Dragomir Radev*
SummerTime: Text Summarization Toolkit for Non-experts
The 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP’21) Demo Track [arxiv] [code] (230+ stars)Ansong Ni*, Daniel Ramos*, Aidan Yang, Ines Lynce, Vasco Manquinho, Ruben Martins, and Claire Le Goues
SOAR: A Synthesis Approach for Data Science API Refactoring
The 43th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE’21)
[arxiv] [code] [talk]Ansong Ni, Pengcheng Yin, and Graham Neubig
Merging Weak and Active Supervision for Semantic Parsing
The 34th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI’20)
[arxiv] [code]
Talks and Presentations
- Enhancing Language Models for Program Synthesis using Execution, Apr 2023, Invited Talk @ UT Austin TAUR Lab
- Enhancing Language Models for Program Synthesis using Execution, Mar 2023, Invited Talk @ HKUST CSE [recordings]
- Enhancing Language Models for Program Synthesis using Execution, Mar 2023, Invited Talk @ MIT CSAIL
[slides] [recordings] - Learning from Self-Sampled Correct and Partially-Correct Programs, June 2022, Paper Presentation @ Meta AI Reading Group
- Merging Weak and Active Supervision for Semantic Parsing, Feb 2020, Oral Paper Presentation @ AAAI Conference
Professional Services
- Program Committee/Reviewer
- ICLR 2024
- ICML 2023
- ACL 2023
- NeurIPS 2022, 2023
- EMNLP 2022
- ACL Rolling Reviews (ARR) 2021-2022
- DL4C Workshop @ ICLR 2023
- SUKI Workshop @ NAACL 2022
- IntEx-SemPar Workshop @ EMNLP 2020
Work Experience
- Google DeepMind – Learning for Code Team, Summer 2023
Research Intern. Hosts: Pengcheng Yin and Charles Sutton - Meta AI – FAIR NLP Group, Summer 2022
Research Intern. Hosts: Victoria Lin and Sida Wang - Microsoft Research – Deep Learning Group, Summer+Fall 2021
Research Intern. Hosts: Alex Polozov, Chris Meek, Chenglong Wang and Jeevana Priya Inala - Allen Institute for AI – AllenNLP Team, Research Intern, Summer 2020
Research Intern. Hosts: Pradeep Dasigi and Matt Gardner - Carnegie Mellon University – Institute of Software Research, Fall 2020
Research Assistant. Host: Claire Le Goues - Microsoft Research Asia – Software Analytics Group, Summer+Fall 2017
Research Intern. Host: Shi Han
Education
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, Yale University, 2020.8 - 2024.5 (expected)
- M.S. in Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, 2018.8-2019.12
- B.Eng. in Software Engineering, Nanjing University, 2014.8-2018.6
Miscellaneous
- My first name can be pronounce as-is: [An-Song], last name is like [Nee].
- A tribute to my late advisor Drago.
- I know how to say “I don’t speak [this language]” in 9 different languages (Mandarin, English, Spanish, Cantonese, Italian, Greek, Korean, Hindi, Hebrew). Very handy, maybe you should know them too.
- I love soccer and I am a Barcelona and Messi fan. I don’t remember how Barca did in UCL 2018-2022 and don’t remind me. My favorite games are:
- 2015 UCL final: Barca 3-1 Juventus
- 2017 UCL round of 16: Barca 6-1 PSG (6-5 on agg.)
- 2022 WC final: Argentina 3-3 France (4-2 in pen.)
- I am from Nanchang, Jiangxi Province in China. I’ve also lived in Nanjing, Beijing, Berkeley, Pittsburgh, Houston, New Haven, and Menlo Park.