BREATHE AI

Principal Investigator

Wei Lu

Full Professor, College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University

I am interested in designing mathematical models and machine learning algorithms to solve fundamental data processing problems, with a particular focus on natural language processing (NLP). My research centers on fundamental aspects of modern language models. Prior to joining NTU, I spent 12 years at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). Before that, I worked as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed my PhD at the Singapore-MIT Alliance of the National University of Singapore. Earlier in my academic journey, I earned my undergraduate degree with first-class honors in Computer Science from the School of Computing, National University of Singapore.

Natural Language Processing Large Language Models Multilingual AI
Sep 2025

Joined the College of Computing and Data Science at Nanyang Technological University.

Apr 2025

Promoted to Full Professor.

Mar 2025

Thanks to AI Singapore for awarding us a new research project under the National Multimodal LLM Program. We look forward to working together! S$4.9M

Sep 2024

Awarded a new HTX industry collaboration project for the StatNLP Group. S$1.5M

Jul 2024

Zhijiang Guo won the SUTD Outstanding Thesis Award.

Jun 2024

Zhijiang Guo secured an Assistant Professor position at HKUST (GZ).

May 2024

Guangtao Zeng secured an internship offer from MIT with Joshua Tenenbaum.

Apr 2024

Honored to be appointed an ST Engineering Distinguished Professor. Thank you, ST Engineering!

Feb 2024

Excited to assume the role of Editor-in-Chief for Computational Linguistics. Thank you, ACL Executive Committee, for giving me this opportunity to serve our community!

Jan 2024

Peiyuan Zhang, Guangtao Zeng, and Tianduo Wang completed pre-training of TinyLlama, which was trending #1 on Hugging Face as of 3 Jan 2024.

Dec 2023

Xiaobing Sun and Jiaxi Li received an Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP.

Jul 2023

Sicong Leng won the ACL Area Chair Award, with multiple nominations; top 1.6% papers received nominations.

Apr 2023

Recognized as a Notable Area Chair for ICLR 2023.

Feb 2023

Jiale Han joined TU Darmstadt as a postdoc with Iryna Gurevych.

Dec 2022

Allan Jie joined UNC Chapel Hill as a postdoc with Mohit Bansal.

Aug 2022

Received an MOE AcRF Tier 2 Award for the StatNLP Group. S$930K

Jul 2022

Xinyu Wang won the Best Paper Award at SemEval 2022.

Jun 2022

The StatNLP Group’s 10-year NLP research was ranked 12th globally based on CSRankings.

May 2022

Shengqiang Zhang joined LMU Munich as a PhD student with Hinrich Schutze.

Feb 2022

Xinyu Wang won SemEval 2022 Task 11 in 10 out of 13 tracks.

Jan 2022

Yuxiang Zhou joined Warwick University as a postdoc with Yulan He.

Jul 2021

Jierui Li joined the University of Texas at Austin as a PhD student with Raymond Mooney.

2023EMNLP 2023

Unraveling Feature Extraction Mechanisms in Neural Networks

Xiaobing Sun, Jiaxi Li, and Wei Lu

Outstanding Paper Award, Interpretability, Interactivity, and Analysis of Models for NLP Track

2023ACL 2023

Contextual Distortion Reveals Constituency: Masked Language Models are Implicit Parsers

Jiaxi Li and Wei Lu

2023ACL 2023

Learning Multi-Step Reasoning by Solving Arithmetic Tasks

Tianduo Wang and Wei Lu

2023ACL 2023

One Network, Many Masks: Towards More Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning

Guangtao Zeng, Peiyuan Zhang, and Wei Lu

2023ACL 2023

Tell2Design: A Dataset for Language-Guided Floor Plan Generation

Sicong Leng, Yang Zhou, Mohammed Haroon Dupty, Wee Sun Lee, Sam C. Joyce, and Wei Lu

Area Chair Award, with multiple award nominations: top 1.6% submissions.

2023ACL 2023 Findings

Tab-CoT: Zero-shot Tabular Chain of Thought

Ziqi Jin and Wei Lu

2023ACL 2023 Findings

Leveraging Training Data in Few-Shot Prompting for Numerical Reasoning

Zhanming Jie and Wei Lu

2023ACL 2023 Findings

Sampling Better Negatives for Distantly Supervised Named Entity Recognition

Lu Xu, Lidong Bing, and Wei Lu

2022EMNLP 2022

Differentiable Data Augmentation for Contrastive Sentence Representation Learning

Tianduo Wang and Wei Lu

2022EMNLP 2022

Better Few-Shot Relation Extraction with Label Prompt Dropout

Peiyuan Zhang and Wei Lu

2022EMNLP 2022

Unsupervised Non-transferable Text Classification

Guangtao Zeng and Wei Lu

2022NAACL 2022

Implicit N-grams Induced by Recurrence

Xiaobing Sun and Wei Lu

Reveals the relationship between non-Markovian RNNs and Markovian classical n-grams. Provides explanations for observations made years ago in the community, e.g. this and this.

More publications on Google Scholar ↗ View the full publication record, citation metrics, and newly released papers.
  • Guangtao Zeng (PhD student; from Sun Yat-Sen University, China; AI Singapore Scholarship)
  • Tianduo Wang (PhD student; from Singapore University of Technology and Design; 1st Class Honors; Singapore Computer Society Excellence Award)
  • Jiaxi Li (PhD student; from Singapore University of Technology and Design; 1st Class Honors)
  • Calvin Tan (PhD student; from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)
  • Chen Huang (PhD student; from East China Normal University, China)
  • Haong Phi Long (PhD student; from Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Vietnam)
  • Renjie Luo (PhD student; from Beihang University, China)
  • Peiwen Zhao (Visiting PhD student; from Beijing Institute of Technology, China)
  • Yutian Lin (Research Assistant; from Singapore University of Technology and Design)
  • Yanbao Wang (Research Assistant; from Singapore University of Technology and Design)
  • Yifan Wang (Research Intern; from National University of Singapore)
  • Cheng Wang (Research Intern; from National University of Singapore)

PhD Students

  • Zhijiang Guo — Now University of Cambridge, UK; internship at University of Edinburgh.
  • Yanyan Zou — Now JD, Beijing; internship at Microsoft Research Asia.
  • Hao Li — Now Tencent, Singapore; internship at Alibaba DAMO.
  • Allan Jie — Now Salesforce, Singapore; internship at Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence; ISTD Best PhD Thesis Award.
  • Lu Xu — Now Huawei, Singapore; EDB IPP Industry PhD Program.
  • Liying Cheng — Now Alibaba, Singapore; EDB IPP Industry PhD Program.
  • Richard Sun — Now A*STAR, Singapore; EMNLP 2023 Outstanding Paper Awardee.
  • Haoran Li — Now ByteDance, Beijing; internship at ByteDance AI Lab, Singapore.
Other Alumni
  • Aaron Liang (Intern; from River Valley High School, Singapore)
  • Shichen Li (Visiting fellow; from Soochow University, China)
  • Renhang Liu (UROP; from Singapore University of Technology and Design)
  • Ziyu Ge (UROP; from Singapore University of Technology and Design)
  • Jerry Feng (UROP; from Singapore University of Technology and Design)
  • Yijia Chen (UROP; from Singapore University of Technology and Design)
  • Pratyush Saini (Intern; from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, India)
  • Ruoxi Ning (Visiting fellow; from Zhejiang University, China)
  • Peiyuan Zhang (Research assistant; to Nanyang Technological University)
  • Sicong Leng (Research assistant; to Nanyang Technological University)
  • Zechen Li (Visiting fellow; from Northeastern University, USA)
  • Shuibai Zhang (Visiting fellow; from Westlake University, China)
  • Shukai Ma (Research assistant; from University of Melbourne, Australia)
  • Qian Yang (Visiting fellow; from Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen, China)
  • Jiale Han (Visiting PhD student; to Technische Universitat Darmstadt, Germany)
  • Yilin Liu (Visiting fellow; from University of Southern California, USA)
  • Vanessa Tan Yun Han (Research assistant; from Singapore University of Technology and Design)
  • Zhiyuan Zeng (Visiting fellow; to University of Zurich, Switzerland)
  • Zhehao Zhang (Visiting fellow; from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Zhiyuan College, China)
  • Xinyu Wang (Visiting PhD student; from ShanghaiTech University, China)
  • Shengqiang Zhang (Research assistant; to Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany)
  • Zizhe Jiang (Visiting fellow; to University of Texas at Austin, USA)
  • Shuyi Jia (UROP; to Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)
  • Christine Liu (Visiting fellow; from University College London, UK)
  • Qingcheng Zeng (Visiting fellow; to Northwestern University, USA)
  • Yuxiang Zhou (Visiting PhD student; to University of Warwick, UK)
  • Jierui Li (Research assistant; to University of Texas at Austin, USA)
  • Jiaqi Zeng (Visiting fellow; to Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  • Xiaobao Wu (Visiting fellow; from Tsinghua University, China)
  • Ankit Garg (Visiting fellow; to University of California San Diego, USA)
  • Rui Qiao (Research assistant; to National University of Singapore)
  • Jue Wang (Visiting fellow; from Zhejiang University, China)
  • Xingce Bao (Visiting fellow; from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
  • Ivan Sekulic (Visiting fellow; from Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Germany)
  • Jack Wu (Visiting fellow; from York University, Canada)
  • Jieyu Chen (Visiting fellow; to Cornell University, USA)
  • Boyuan Zhuang (Research assistant; from University of Science and Technology of China)
  • Jing Liao (Visiting student; from Zhejiang University, China)
  • Ke Shi (Research assistant; to A*STAR AI, Singapore)
  • Jiaqi Pan (Visiting fellow; to Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  • Rishabh Bhardwaj (Visiting student; to National University of Singapore)
  • Leiming Du (Research assistant; to Huawei, China)
  • Yu Jian Wu (Visiting student; to Columbia University, USA)
  • Anh Nguyen Tuan (Visiting fellow; from Vietnam National University)
  • Peter Phandi (Research assistant; from National University of Singapore)
  • Utkarsh Sinha (Visiting fellow; to Columbia University, USA)
  • Yiran Wang (Research officer; to Columbia University, USA)
  • Amila Silva (Research assistant; to Singapore Management University)
  • Hans Du (Visiting student; from Academia Sinica, Taiwan)
  • Bill Lin (Visiting student; to University of Southern California, USA)
  • Yinan Shao (Visiting student; from Harbin Institute of Technology, China)
  • Bailin Wang (Visiting student; to University of Edinburgh, UK)
  • Rachael Boyle (Visiting student; from University of California, Berkeley, USA)
  • Yaqi Xie (UROP; to National University of Singapore)
  • Siyuan Wang (UROP; to Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  • Aldrian Obaja Muis (Research assistant; to Carnegie Mellon University, USA)
  • Raymond Hendy Susanto (Research assistant; from National University of Singapore)
  • Swee Kiat Lim (Research officer; from National University of Singapore)
  • Wei Yang (Visiting student; to University of Waterloo, Canada)
  • Hesam Amoualian (Visiting student; from University of Grenoble Alpes, France)
  • Shaosheng Cao (Research assistant; to AI Department, Ant Financial Services Group/Alipay, China)
  • Liling Tan (Research assistant; from Saarland University, Germany)
  • Moein Khajehnejad (Research officer; from Sharif University of Technology, Iran)
  • Jonathan Lofgren (Research officer; from Uppsala University, Sweden)
  • Bojia Qiu (Visiting student; from Zhejiang University, Chu Kochen Honors College)
  • Wenqiang Xu (Research officer; from University of Science and Technology of China, Special Class for the Gifted Young)
  • Tu Thanh Vu (Research officer; to University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA)
  • Si Kai Lee (Research officer; to Columbia University, USA)
  • Sadegh Charmchi (Research officer; to University of Alberta, Canada)
  • Ruidan He (UROP; to National University of Singapore)
  • Cuong Xuan Chu (Research officer; to Max Planck Institute, Germany)
  • Lifei Chen (Research officer; to Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland)
  • Sean Matthew English (Research officer; to Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute, Germany)

  • Principal Investigator, Alibaba Innovative Research Program (2018-2019), US$100K

  • Principal Investigator, MOE Tier 2 Grant (2018-2021), S$540K

  • Principal Investigator, DSO Collaboration Grant (2017-2019), S$500K

  • Principal Investigator, Defence Innovative Research Programme Project (TBA), S$890K

  • Principal Investigator, MINDEF Grant - CISDeM T3 (2014-2018), S$610K

  • Area Chair Award, The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023), 2023

  • Best Paper Award, the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2011), 2011

  • Dean’s Graduate Research Excellence Award, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 2009-2010

  • Research Achievement Award, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 2008-2009

  • President’s Fellowship, National University of Singapore, 2006-2007

  • Singapore-MIT Alliance Scholarship, 2005-2006 and 2006-2009

  • Dean’s List, School of Computing, National University of Singapore, 2001-2005

  • Singapore MOE Undergraduate Scholarship, 2000-2005

  • 1st Prize with perfect score 140/140, National Mathematical Olympiad Competition, China, 1996

  • 1st Prize, National Mathematical Olympiad Competition, China, 1995