I'm a Postdoc Fellow at Human-Centered AI Institude (HAI) in Stanford University, working with Alex 'Sandy' Pentland , Yejin Choi .
I recieved my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering department at University of California, San Diego, advised by Prof. Julian McAuley, and was honored to be awarded the IBM PhD Fellowship in 2022.
I previously spent two years as a Research Scientist at the MIT-IBM Lab , responsible for the post training (safety and alignment) of IBM's foundation models (Granite Vision Series). I also worked as an intern at the Microsoft Research and Google.
Contact:zexueh [AT] stanford.edu | zehe [AT] ucsd.edu Full Publications:Google Scholar
Research Highlights
My research builds post-training and inference-time methods that make LLMs and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) more capable and reliable — spanning core capabilities (reasoning, long-context modeling, coding) as well as safety and alignment.
Ph.D. 2020 - 2024
Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego (UCSD), U.S.
Ph.D. student in Computer Science
Advisor: Prof. Julian McAuley Committee: Prof. Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick, Prof. Jingbo Shang, Prof. Zhiting Hu
B.S. 2015 - 2019
College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing Normal University (BNU), China
B.S. in Computer Science and Technology
NEC Labs, Princeton, NJ
Research Intern • June. 2021 to Sept. 2021 Multimodality Data Representation Learning
Advisor: Dr. Yuncong Chen Data Science & System Security Group
Microsoft Research Asia, Beijing, China
Research Intern • Oct. 2019 to Dec. 2019 Algorithmic Trading: High-Frequency Time Series Machine Learning and Data Mining
Advisor: Dr. Kan Ren Machine Learning Group
Google, Beijing, China
Engineering Practicum Intern • Jul. 2017 to Sept. 2017 Knowledge Graph Source Discovery: Wikipedia-like Sites Discovery and Analysis
Advisor: Jiang Bian, team manager Dataz Group
Research Experiences
Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, U.S.
Research Intern • Apr. 2018 to Oct. 2018 Robust Learning for Domain Generalization (DG) without Domain Information
Mentor: Haohan Wang, Ph.D. candidate at LTI, CMU
Advisors: Prof. Zachary C. Lipton.
Information Retrieval Group, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Research Assistant • Jun. 2017 to May 2018 Investigating Human Examination Behavior on Mobile Search
Advisor: Prof. Yiqun Liu
Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistic, Peking University, Beijing, China
Research Assistant • Dec. 2017 to May 2018 Leveraging Gloss Knowledge in Neural Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) Chinese Word Segmentation (CWS) with Character Glyph Embedding
Advisor: Prof. Baobao Chang
School of Life Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Research Assistant • Nov. 2015 to Sept. 2017 Genetic Biological Parallel Computing System for NP-hard Problems
Advisor: Prof. Xudong Zhu
Scholarships
UCSD Chancellor's Dissertation Medal (Finalist)
• 2025 • UCSD IBM Ph.D. Fellowship
• 2022-2024 • IBM TwoSigma Ph.D. Fellowship Final Nomination
• 2022-2024 • TwoSigma Jacobs School of Engineering Fellowship
• 2020-2021 • University of California San Diego The First-class Scholarship for Academic Excellence
• 2018 • Beijing Normal University The First-class Scholarship for Competition Excellence
• 2016, 2017, 2018 • Beijing Normal University Google Intern Scholarship
• 2017 • Google Inc.
Gold Medal in International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (iGEM) at Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
• 2016 Silver Medal in International Collegiate Programming Contest at Beijing regional site (ACM/ICPC, Beijing)
• 2016 Bronze Medal in International Collegiate Programming Contest at Dalian regional site (ACM/ICPC, Dalian)
• 2016 Best Female Team in China Collegiate Programming Final Contest (CCPC Final)
• 2016
