Steven Feng

Bio

I'm a 2nd-year Stanford Computer Science PhD student and NSERC PGS-D scholar, working with the Stanford AI Lab and Stanford NLP Group. I am co-advised by Michael C. Frank and Noah Goodman and am part of the Language & Cognition (LangCog) and Computation & Cognition (CoCo) Labs. Previously, I was a master's student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and an undergraduate student at the University of Waterloo.

My ultimate goal is to blend knowledge from multiple disciplines to advance AI research, specifically by teaching machines how to understand and generate human language and vision. I have explored ways to improve the controllability of language and visual generation models, incorporate and assess their reasoning capabilities, and integrate structured and multimodal information to enhance them. I am also exploring psychologically and cognitively-inspired methods to close the gap between human and LLM learning while shedding further light on human cognitive models and our efficient language acquisition capabilities.

I worked with Eduard Hovy at CMU's Language Technologies Institute and Malihe Alikhani at the University of Pittsburgh on research projects involving language generation, semantics, and data augmentation. Earlier, I worked at the University of Waterloo with Jesse Hoey.

My research contributions have been recognized with several publications at major conferences and a best paper award at INLG 2021. I am also an Honorable Mention for the Jessie W.H. Zou Memorial Award and CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.

I am a co-instructor for the Stanford CS25 Transformers course, and mentor and advise several students. I also led the organization of CtrlGen, a controllable generation workshop at NeurIPS 2021, and was involved in the GEM benchmark and workshop for NLG evaluation.

In my free time, I enjoy gaming, playing the piano and guitar, martial arts, and table tennis. I am also the founder and president of the Stanford Piano Society.