Ruochen Wang

About Me

I am the founder and current principal of TurningPoint AI Research focus on multimodal agents (no we are not yet a startup) and a final-year Ph.D. at UCLA with Prof. Cho-Jui Hsieh. I am also a long-term Student Researcher at Google working with Prof. Inderjit S. Dhillon, Felix Yu, Boqing Gong, and Ting Liu.

I was the 1st-author recepient of the Outstanding Paper Award at ICLR. I received my B.S. in Computer Science and Statistics at the University of Michigan, with the highest distinction.

I am interested in Venture Capitalism.

Research Background (selected)

My goal is to build highly automatized, reliable and self-evolving multimodal language agents. Some technologies I worked on include:

• LLM-era: Instruction finetuning and prompt optimization of (M)LLMs, controllable generation and alignment of Diffusion models, MLLM safety, reasoning and agent finetuning.
• Pre-LLM-era: Efficient and automated ML, including AutoML and Dataset Compression.

Awards (selected)

• Outstanding Paper Award, ICLR 2021, 04/2021.
• Outstanding Graduate Student (1 per department), UCLA CS Department, 05/2022.
• Award of Excellence, Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA), 09/2019.
• Highest Distinction Graduate Award, The University of Michigan, 08/2019.
• Berkeley Fung’s Excellence Scholarship, UC Berkeley Graduate Admission Committee, 03/2019.
• Outstanding Intern Award, SenseTime, 01/2019.
• James B. Angell Scholar, The University of Michigan, 2017-2019.

Outreach

• [TurningPoint AI] TPAI is a multi-lab research collaboration dedicated to exploring key technologies in building reliable multimodal foundational agents (involving MLLMs and Diffusion Models). We are a compact but hardcore team aims at pushing the boundary of state-of-the-art academic research, and eventually commercialize the results. For more information, please visit our website.

• [Work] I am open to industrial opportunities (Corporate Research Team, VC, Startups) focus on building and commericializing next generation AIGC technologies. If you are in VC/Startup business or leading a corporate research team, I’d be delighted to have a chat with you.

Experiences (Selected)

• TurningPoint AI Research - Founder & Principal (Aug 2023 - Present)
  Areas: Multimodal Agents
  Advisory Board: Tianyi Zhou, Minhao Cheng, Cho-Jui Hsieh
  Project Leads: Yuanhao Ban, Xirui Li, Hengguang Zhou, Yihang Chen, Sohyun An, Licheng Lan, Andrew Bai

• Google Research @AdsML - Student Researcher (Oct 2023 - Present)
  Prompting and instruction finetuning of (Multimodal) Large Language Models
  Hosts: Inderjit S. Dhillon, Felix Yu, Si Si, Cho-Jui Hsieh

• Google Research - Student Researcher (May 2022 - 2023)
  Text-to-Image Diffusion Models, Efficient Transformers
  Host: Ting Liu & Boqing Gong

• Microsoft Research Asia (2019)
  Neural Architecture Search
  Host: Kai Chen

Publications

Something personal

Currently, my interests are centered around a diverse reading habit and practicing swordsmanship. I am a student of Katori Shintō-Ryū (天真正伝香取神道流), the ealiest comprehensive Japanese martial art system that has been passed down by 23 Shihans（师范）since 600 year ago.

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