Ziru Chen

Ron | 陈子如 | チン シジョ
The Ohio State University
C.V.      chen.8336@osu.edu
ronch99      @RonZiruChen

I am a Ph.D. student at OSU SunLab advised by Prof. Huan Sun. My research focuses on Natural Language Processing, Conversational AI, and Machine Learning. I'm particularly interested in developing practical, reliable, and generalizable language agents that can accomplish real-world tasks by processing heterogeneous data, planning and reasoning in programs, and collaborating with users:
  • My approach to LLM research is to treat the models as black-boxs and study their behaviors by manipulating data, training algorithms, and inference methods. Recently, I am actively thinking about improving LLMs' inference-time computation, such as iterative refinement, tree search, and hierarchical planning.
  • I prefer principled agent designs that are simple, effective, and cost-efficient over complex frameworks with many modules and pipelines. I believe we should grasp a decent understanding of each component and method, e.g. discriminator, grounding unit, and planning method, before incorporating them into an agent.
  • The development of language agents is never a one-time effort. I'm interested in developing new algorithms that enable agents to continually learn from human, AI, and environment feedback, generalize beyond their initial training corpus, and provide personalized experiences for their users.
I am also interested in human languages themselves. So far, I can speak Chinese, English, Japanese (JLPT N2), and some elementary Korean.
My favorite quote is “Cogito, ergo sum.” (or in English, “I think. Therefore, I am.”) by René Descartes.

News

  • 01/2025: ScienceAgentBench is accepted at ICLR 2025; 1 paper on Chemistry agent accepted at NAACL 2025 (Findings).
  • 10/2024: Releasing ScienceAgentBench, a new benchmark to rigorously assess language agents for data-driven scientific discovery. Check out our pre-print for more details.
  • 05/2024: 1 paper on planning with LLMs accepted at ACL 2024; 1 paper on LLM for E-commerce and RecSys accepted at ICML 2024.
  • 10/2023: 2 papers on text-to-SQL parsing and 1 paper on LLM attribution evaluation accepted at EMNLP 2023.
  • 07/2023: Our TacoBot report is accepted as a demo paper at SIGDIAL 2023.
  • 05/2023: 1 paper accepted at ACL 2023 and 3 preprints out on Arxiv.
  • 06/2022: Won the 3rd place in Alexa Prize TaskBot Challege as a student co-lead! Check out our report.
  • 04/2022: Excited to receive the Undergraduate Research Award from OSU CSE Department!
  • 02/2022: Thrilled to receive the University Fellowship as an incoming Ph.D. student!
  • 05/2021 - 07/2021: Had some fun time at Deep Learning Lab, Westlake University as a Research Intern.
  • 04/2021: Excited to receive the CIS Undrgrad Scholarship from OSU CSE Department!

Honors and Awards

  • University Fellowship, The Ohio State University, 2022 - 2023 & 2026 - 2027
  • 3rd Place (Student Co-lead of Team TacoBot), 1st Alexa Prize Taskbot Challenge, Amazon, 2022
  • Undergraduate Research Award, The Ohio State University, 2022
  • CIS Undergrad Scholarship, The Ohio State University, 2021 - 2022

Teaching


Selected Publications

Please check out my Google Scholar for a complete list of publications.


Interesting TMI

* TMI is a Korean short-hand of "Too Much Information," which roughly refers to fun facts that could have not been shared ;)
I was born on Thanksgiving that year.
My first name in Japanese sounds like "to wash feet" in Chinese.
My MBTI is INTJ.