Ziyan Yang

(Yang 杨 [family name] Ziyan 紫嫣 [given name])

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I am a final-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Rice University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Vicente Ordóñez Román. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Bryn Mawr College. My research focuses on multimodal machine learning, especially vision and language.

During my Ph.D., I have interned at eBay in summer 2021 mentored by Jiangbo Yuan on building pipelines for object detection models. I also have interned at Adobe Research during summer 2022 and fall 2022 under the guidance of Kushal Kafle, Zhihong Ding, Zhe Lin and Scott Cohen, focusing on relation-object prediction and grounding. From summer 2023, I start to intern at Netflix and receive mentorship from Mahdi Kalayeh. Here is my CV.

news

Sep 20, 2024 One paper was accepted to EMNLP 2024 - Findings :tada:
Feb 26, 2024 Two papers were accepted to WACV 2024 and CVPR 2024 :tada:
Nov 13, 2023 I successfully defended my Ph.D. thesis! :sparkles: :tada: :sparkles: :tada:
May 22, 2023 I started an internship at Netflix. :smile:
Feb 28, 2023 Our work Improving Visual Grounding by Encouraging Consistent Gradient-based Explanations has been accepted to CVPR 2023. Check our demo here! :tada:
Nov 30, 2022 I did my Ph.D. Thesis Proposal! :sparkles:
May 26, 2022 I started an internship at Adobe Research. :smile:
Jan 15, 2022 Our work on Backpropagation-based decoding for MMT has been accepted to Frontiers in AI. :tada:
Sep 1, 2021 I obtained a master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Virginia and moved to Rice University to continue my PhD. :sparkles:
Jun 8, 2021 I started an internship at eBay! :smile:

selected publications

  1. EMNLP24
    PropTest: Automatic Property Testing for Improved Visual Programming
    Jaywon Koo, Ziyan Yang, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Baishakhi Ray, and Vicente Ordonez
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2024
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  2. CVPR24
    Improved Visual Grounding through Self-Consistent Explanations
    Ruozhen He, Paola Cascante-Bonilla, Ziyan Yang, Alexander C Berg, and Vicente Ordonez
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2023
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  3. WACV24
    SCoRD: Subject-Conditional Relation Detection with Text-Augmented Data
    Ziyan Yang, Kushal Kafle, Zhe Lin, Scott Cohen, Zhihong Ding, and Vicente Ordonez
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision, 2024
  4. CVPR23
    Improving Visual Grounding by Encouraging Consistent Gradient-based Explanations
    Ziyan Yang, Kushal Kafle, Franck Dernoncourt, and Vicente Ordonez
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2023
    HTML Demo Code
  5. Frontiers
    Backpropagation-based decoding for multimodal machine translation
    Ziyan Yang, Leticia Pinto-Alva, Franck Dernoncourt, and Vicente Ordonez
    Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2022
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  6. IJCAI21
    Closing the generalization gap of adaptive gradient methods in training deep neural networks
    Jinghui Chen, Dongruo Zhou, Yiqi Tang, Ziyan Yang, Yuan Cao, and Quanquan Gu
    In Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Conference on International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 2021
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  7. EMNLP20
    Using visual feature space as a pivot across languages
    Ziyan Yang, Leticia Pinto-Alva, Franck Dernoncourt, and Vicente Ordonez
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2020
    HTML Demo
  8. OPT20
    On the Convergence of Adaptive Gradient Methods for Nonconvex Optimization
    Dongruo Zhou, Jinghui Chen, Yuan Cao, Yiqi Tang, Ziyan Yang, and Quanquan Gu
    Annual Workshop on Optimization for Machine Learning, NeurIPS, 2020
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