Shaobo Cui
![Shaobo.jpeg](/assets/img/Shaobo.jpeg?53f59c9f7740d84a9753d80860c91532)
I am a fourth-year PhD student in Computer Science at EPFL, working under the supervision of Prof. Boi Faltings. I am co-supervised by Prof. Antoine Bosselut and mentored by Prof. Michael C. Gastpar. I am expected to complete my PhD by July, 2025.
Previously, I worked as a senior NLP engineer at DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group, where I led projects in machine comprehension, dialogue systems, and recommendation algorithms for digital humans. Notably, I developed the recommendation algorithm for the digital human project from 0-1, leading to the debut of the Virtual Influencer at Olympic Games, Beijing 2022. I also hold 9 patents.
Before joining Alibaba, I earned my Bachelor degree from Beihang University and my Master degree from Tsinghua University.
Research Highlights: Human-Machine Interaction
I am passionate about enhancing machines’ ability to understand and interact with humans:
- Industrial Dialogue Systems: (i) Enhancing retrieval dialogue systems using session information(QSM paper @ CIKM, CSM @ KDD, patent, patent); (ii) Developing methods for generative dialogue systems, including teacher-student(MTSS) framework(AAAI paper) and dual adversarial learning(DAL) framework (workshop@NAACL paper); (iii) Detecting optimal response timing to in industrial dialogue systems(TASLP paper); (iv) Knowledge extraction via a OneStop approach workshop@WWW; (v) Developing methods and platforms for the automated testing of dialogue systems patents.
- Virtual Influencer: (i) Built the recommendation algorithm of Alibaba Virtual Influencer from 0-1, leading to its debut at Olympic Games; (ii) Applying generative methods to assist virtual influencers in constructing their manuscript CIKM paper.
- Machine Learning: Greedy coordinate descent, regularized optimal transport, and Lipschitz constrainted WGAN(NeurIPS paper, ITCAI paper).
Research Highlights: Causality
My PhD thesis aims to advance machine understanding of causality, with a focus on:
- Commonsense Causality: Feel free to check our survey about commonsense causality.
- Defeasibility in Causality: We defined and quantified defeasibility, an often-overlooked aspect of causality (ACL 2024).
- LLMs’ Consistency on Causality: We empirically study whether LLMs can keep self-consistency over nuances hidden inside causality preprint.
- Causality for Science: Ongoing. Will release it later.
![example image](/assets/img/overview/research.png)
For Prospective Students
I have reserved time slots to supervise master students for thesis and semester projects. Undergraduate and master’s students interested in research projects are encouraged to read this page for more information.
News
May 15, 2024 | Two papers got accepted in ACL 2024 (Findings). |
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Mar 15, 2023 | One paper got accepted in ICASSP 2023. |
Sep 01, 2021 | Starting my PhD study in EPFL under the supervision of Prof. Faltings. |
Jul 11, 2019 | Starting a Happy Journey in DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group. |