Lechen Zhang

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Hi, I am Lechen! I am a master student at University of Michigan, with a broad interest in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. My research focuses on developing robust and trustworthy language models that better understand and think like humans.

Currently I am a Research Assistant in Blablablab, advised by Professor David Jurgens. I am also working with Professor Lu Wang as a member of Launch Lab. Previously, I earned my bachelor’s degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

I am actively seeking PhD opportunities for Fall 2025! You can find my CV here.

news

Nov 12, 2024 Excited to Attend EMNLP 2024! See you in Miami :palm_tree:
Oct 15, 2024 Submitting 4 new papers in this cycle! Check out our newly released preprints about System Prompting, Factuality Evaluation, and Human-AI Dialog Simulation.
Jun 18, 2024 I am presenting our paper at NAACL 2024 today. Check our slides here!
May 20, 2024 I am thrilled to join Launch Lab working with Professor Lu Wang!
Mar 13, 2024 My first paper has been accepted as an oral at NAACL 2024. See you in Mexico City!

selected publications

* indicates equal contribution
  1. NAACL 2024
    Oral
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    You don’t need a personality test to know these models are unreliable: Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models on Psychometric Instruments
    Bangzhao Shu*, Lechen Zhang*, Minje Choi, Lavinia Dunagan, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, Dallas Card, and David Jurgens
    In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), Jun 2024
    DOI arXiv Code Slides Twitter
  2. Preprint
    Under Review
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    SPRIG: Improving Large Language Model Performance by System Prompt Optimization
    Lechen Zhang, Tolga Ergen, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, and David Jurgens
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.14826, Oct 2024
    arXiv Code Slides Twitter
  3. Preprint
    Under Review
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    FactBench: A Dynamic Benchmark for In-the-Wild Language Model Factuality Evaluation
    Farima Fatahi Bayat, Lechen Zhang, Sheza Munir, and Lu Wang
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.22257, Oct 2024
    arXiv Code Twitter
  4. Preprint
    Under Review
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    Real or Robotic? Assessing Whether LLMs Accurately Simulate Qualities of Human Responses in Dialogue
    Jonathan Ivey*, Shivani Kumar*, Jiayu Liu*, Hua Shen*, Sushrita Rakshit*, Rohan Raju*, Haotian Zhang*, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam*, Junghwan Kim*, Bowen Yi*, Dustin Wright*, Abraham Israeli*, Anders Giovanni Møller*, Lechen Zhang*, and David Jurgens
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.08330, Sep 2024
    arXiv Code Twitter
  5. Under Review
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    Causally Modeling the Linguistic and Social Factors that Predict Email Response
    Yinuo Xu*, Hong Chen*, Sushrita Rakshit*, Aparna Ananthasubramaniam*, Omkar Yadav*, Mingqian Zheng*, Michael Jiang*, Lechen Zhang*, Bowen Yi*, Kenan Alkiek*, Abraham Israeli*, Bangzhao Shu*, Hua Shen*, Jiaxin Pei*, Haotian Zhang*, Miriam Schirmer*, and David Jurgens
    Sep 2024