Dr. Peng is an Assistant Professor at the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He received my Ph.D. from the University of Washington, with Noah Smith, and his Bachelors Degree from Peking University.
He is broadly interested in large language models (LLMs). Recently, he focuses on AI towards:
- Solving complex reasoning problems in a generalizable and data-efficient way; he believes that learning from experience (e.g., through reinforcement learning) and insights from human cognition are crucial towards this goal;
- Understanding and reasoning about the world causally;
- Positively impacting society;
- Advancing the frontier of human knowledge and contributing to scientific discovery, which he sees as the ultimate demonstration of true generalization beyond the human knowledge they have been trained on.
Outside work, he caters to the whims of a quartet of furry overlords: Meera, Loki, Sylvie, and Kea. When they release him from their service, he cycles in the summer, and (backcountry) ski in the winter.
