Hi! I am an assistant professor in Natural Language Processing Department at MBZUAI. I got my Ph.D degree at KAUST supervised by Prof. Xiangliang Zhang and Prof. Xin Gao. Prior to KAUST, I got my B.S degree in Computer Science at Wuhan University supervised by Prof. Qian Wang and my M.S degree in Peking University, supervised by Prof. Rui Yan and Prof. Dongyan Zhao.

My research advances human-centered natural language processing, aiming to build trustworthy, interpretable, and reliable large language models.

• Foundational NLP Studying reasoning [ICLR], interpretability [ACL], and Stability [NeurIPS] in large models.

• Real-World NLP Systems Bridging research and large-scale deployment, such as in short-video platforms📱 [ACL], E-commerce platforms💳 [WSDM] and embodied robotic systems🤖 [AAAI].

• AI for Science & Society Applying NLP/AI to scientific discovery, including AI for Medicine [Nature Computational Science], AI for Chemistry [Communications Chemistry], Computational Social Science [IJCAI] [EMNLP].

I am actively looking for highly motivated PhD student, Master’s students, and interns. All stipends are tax-free. If you are interested in working with me on generative language models, LLM-based agents, and related interdisciplinary topics please feel free to contact me at xiuying.chen@mbzuai.ac.ae. Here are some suggestions for preparing the email:

• Please use Subject Line as: “RA/Master/PhD Prospective Student \$YourName”

• Please highlight your publications (if applicable), GPA/ranking, TOEFL and IELTS scores, and anything important

• Attach your CV

I also serve on the research committee and help organize the NLP Department seminar series together with Prof. Monojit. If you are a faculty member, researcher, or industry practitioner interested in giving a talk, please feel free to contact me.

🔥 News

• 2026.2: 1 AI4Medicine paper accepted by CVPR findings.
• 2026.2: 🎉 Very honored to receive the Rising Star of NLP award at MBZUAI’s 5th anniversary celebration. Our lab member, Lang Gao, also won the Outstanding Research Contribution Award (Student Category).
• 2026.1: 2 papers accepted by ICLR. Checkout: LLM Reasoning Bound, reported by Deeptech
• 2025.12: 🎉 Received the Amazon Research Award 2025 (USD 100,000)
• 2025.11: 1 paper accepted by AAAI. Checkout: Embodied Reasoning
• 2025.9: 2 paper accepted by NeurIPS Checkout: Agentic Reasoning
• 2025.8: 4 paper accepted by EMNLP and 2 papers by EMNLP findings. Checkout: Fake News Detection, Fake News Simulation
• 2025.6: 1 paper accepted by ACM MM. Checkout: Personalized LLM
• 2025.5: 5 papers accepted by ACL and 5 papers accepted by ACL findings. Checkout: Interpretable Jailbreak Defense
• 2025.4: Received the Google Cloud Research Credits Program (USD 5,000)

👥 HALO Lab

(Human-Aligned Language Optimization Lab)

PhD Students

• Zirui Song (B.S.@UTS)- Embodied AI [NAACL’25] [AAAI’26]
• Lang Gao (B.S.@HUST) - Interpretability [ACL’25]
• Jinghui Zhang (B.S.@SDU) - Personalization [MM’25]

Visiting Students

• Akash Ghosh (Ph.D.@IIT Patna) - AI4Science [CVPR findings]
• Puning Yang (M.S.@University of Chinese Academy of Sciences) - LLM Unlearning
• Fengxian Ji (B.S.@NEU) - Agents

PhD Students (Co-supervised)

• Ruihong Zeng (Co-supervised with Preslav Nakov) (M.S.@SYSU)- LLM Unlearning, Fact Checking

• Chong Tian (Co-supervised with Qirong Ho) (B.S.@SDU) - Fact Checking [EMNLP’25]
• Zixiao Wang (Co-supervised with Kun Zhang) - Personalization [ACL findings’25]

Master Students

• Chenxi Wang (B.S.@XJU) - Interpretability [ACL findings’25] [EMNLP findings’25]
• Ishita Agarwal (B.S.@Sharda University)
• Besher Hassan (Co-supervised with Fajri Koto) (B.S.@Ajman University of Science & Technology)
• Muhammad Cendekia Airlangga (Co-supervised with Kentaro Inui)
• Dequan Yang (Ph.D.@SJTU)
• Fadli Aulawi Al Ghiffari (Co-supervised with Imran Razzak) (B.S.@University of Indonesia)
• Youssef Mohamed Khalil Mohamed (Co-supervised with Imran Razzak)

Past Research Associates

• Kaiyang Wan (B.S.@BUPT, Ph.D.@INSAIT) - Reasoning [ACL findings’25], [ICLR’26]
• Zixiang Xu (B.S.@SCU) - Multilinguality [ACL’25]
• Yanbo Wang (B.S.@SCU) - Agent [NeurIPS’25], Stability [NeurIPS’25]
• Yougang Lyu (Ph.D.@Amsterdam University)
• Xueran Han (Ph.D.@MBZUAI)

Alumni

• Guoming Li

💬 Invited Talks and Tutorials

• 2024.05, Large Language Model–Driven Agents and Role-Playing, Chinese Information Processing Society of China, Urumqi
• 2023.09, AI Generated Text: Unlocking Accuracy, Trust, and Progress, Wuhan University
• 2023.03, Improving Abstractive Summarization Systems by Addressing Informativeness, Faithfulness, and Robustness, Renmin University of China
• 2023.03, Improving Abstractive Summarization Systems by Addressing Informativeness, Faithfulness, and Robustness, Shandong University

⭐ Services

• 2026, Area Chair, ACL, EMNLP, KDD; Associate Editor, Health Information Science and Systems
• 2025, Area Chair, ACL, EMNLP; Associate Editor, Health Information Science and Systems
• 2024, Program Committee, ICLR, ICML, Area Chair, ACL, EMNLP
• 2023, Program Committee, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, IJCAI, SIGIR, NeurIPS.
• 2022, Program Committee, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, IJCAI, SIGIR.
• 2021, Program Committee, AAAI, ACL, EMNLP, SIGIR, Senior Program Committee, IJCAI.

🎨 Miscellaneous

I enjoy reading novels as much as I love research. “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” “Dream of the Red Chamber,” “Fortress Besieged,” “Laughing in the Wind,” and “Gone with the Wind”… are among my favorite books. To me, it is an eternal and fascinating question of how to tell your story or present your research in an engaging way so that others can be attracted and feel excited as well. The goal I pursue in writing is to “simplify like the autumn tree, and innovate like the February flower” – a Chinese idiom that means to streamline and refine while also introducing fresh and original ideas.