Taiwei Shi

Researcher (NLP + CSS)

I teach computers to learn, think, and teach.
I have collaborated with researchers and developers while working at USC and Georgia Tech.

Education

Present — Aug. 2023
Ph.D. in Computer Science
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Advisor: Jieyu Zhao
May 2023 — Aug. 2020
B.S. in Computer Science
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Thesis: Investigating AAVE in Question Answering System
Overall GPA: 3.96/4.00, Highest Honors
Thesis
May 2020 — Aug. 2017
High School Diploma
George School, Newtown, PA
Head of School List, Honor Roll

Industry Research Experience

Summer 2024
Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA
Research Intern, Augmented Learning and Reasoning, Office of Applied Research
Mentor: Longqi Yang, Jennifer Neville
Aligning Language Models with In-situ Human Feedbacks.

Academic Research Experience

Present - Aug 2023
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
Research Assistant, Language, Intelligence, and Model Ethics (LIME) Lab
Advisor: Jieyu Zhao
Working on alignment, synthetic data, and human-AI interaction.
May 2023 - Aug 2022
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Research Assistant, Entertainment Intelligence and Human-Centered AI Labs
Advisor: Mark Riedl
Worked on explainable AI and controlled story generation.
Dec 2022 — May 2022
USC Information Sciences Institute, Marina del Rey, CA
Research Intern, CUTELABNAME
Advisor: Jonathan May, Xuezhe Ma
Improved automated online content moderation.
Aug. 2022 — Aug. 2021
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Research Assistant, Social and Language Technologies (SALT) Lab
Advisor: Diyi Yang
Explored the robustness of QA and deep generative models on different dialects.
Jun. 2021 — Mar. 2021
Nanyang Technological University, Remote
Research Assistant, NTU NLP Group
Advisor: Luu Anh Tuan
Contextualized hate speech classifiers with a novel regularization technique.

Honors and Awards

2024
Best Paper Runner-up at ICLR 2024 Workshop on SeT LLM
For my paper "How Susceptible are Large Language Models to Ideological Manipulation?"
2022
Georgia Tech Convergence Innovation Competition Runner-up
For my iOS keyboard extension that encourages positive thinking.
2020 — 2023
Georgia Tech Dean's List
Achieved at least a 3.5 GPA during a semester with minimum 14 credit hours.

Publications

Selected: Latest & Greatest

WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback
Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He, Mengting Wan, Pei Zhou, Sujay Jauhar, Sihao Chen, Shan Xia, Hongfei Zhang, Jieyu Zhao, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jennifer Neville
Arxiv Preprint (Preprint). 2024.
Project PDF BibTeX
Safer-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Automated Preference Data
Taiwei Shi, Kai Chen, Jieyu Zhao
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). 2024.
Project PDF Code BibTeX
CoAnnotating: Uncertainty-Guided Work Allocation between Human and Large Language Models for Data Annotation
Minzhi Li, Taiwei Shi, Caleb Ziems, Min-Yen Kan, Nancy F. Chen, Zhengyuan Liu, Diyi Yang
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2023.
Project PDF Code BibTeX

Conference

C4
How Susceptible are Large Language Models to Ideological Manipulation?
Kai Chen, Zihao He, Jun Yan, Taiwei Shi, Kristina Lerman
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2024.
Project PDF Code BibTeX Best Paper Runner-up at ICLR 2024 Workshop on SeT LLM
C3
Can Language Model Moderators Improve the Health of Online Discourse?
Hyundong Cho, Shuai Liu, Taiwei Shi, Darpan Jain, Basem Rizk, Yuyang Huang, Zixun Lu, Nuan Wen, Jonathan Gratch, Emilio Ferrara, Jonathan May
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). 2024.
Project PDF BibTeX
C2
Safer-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Automated Preference Data
Taiwei Shi, Kai Chen, Jieyu Zhao
North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL). 2024.
Project PDF Code BibTeX
C1
CoAnnotating: Uncertainty-Guided Work Allocation between Human and Large Language Models for Data Annotation
Minzhi Li, Taiwei Shi, Caleb Ziems, Min-Yen Kan, Nancy F. Chen, Zhengyuan Liu, Diyi Yang
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). 2023.
Project PDF Code BibTeX

Preprint

P3
On the Trustworthiness of Generative Foundation Models
Yue Huang, Chujie Gao, Siyuan Wu, Haoran Wang, Xiangqi Wang, Yujun Zhou, Yanbo Wang, Jiayi Ye, Jiawen Shi, Qihui Zhang, Yuan Li, Han Bao, Zhaoyi Liu, Tianrui Guan, Dongping Chen, Ruoxi Chen, Kehan Guo, Andy Zou, Bryan Hooi Kuen-Yew, Caiming Xiong, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Hongyang Zhang, Hongzhi Yin, Huan Zhang, Huaxiu Yao, Jaehong Yoon, Jieyu Zhang, Kai Shu, Kaijie Zhu, Mohit Bansal, Ranjay Krishna, Swabha Swayamdipta, Taiwei Shi, Weijia Shi, Xiang Li, Yiwei Li, Yuexing Hao, Zhengqing Yuan, Zhihao Jia, Zhize Li, Xiuying Chen, Zhengzhong Tu, Xiyang Hu, Tianyi Zhou, Jieyu Zhao, Lichao Sun, Furong Huang, Or Cohen-Sasson, Prasanna Sattigeri, Anka Reuel, Max Lamparth, Yue Zhao, Nouha Dziri, Yu Su, Huan Sun, Heng Ji, Chaowei Xiao, Nitesh V. Chawla, Jian Pei, Jianfeng Gao, Michael Backes, Philip S. Yu, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, Pin-Yu Chen, Bo Li, Xiangliang Zhang
Arxiv Preprint (Preprint). 2025.
Project PDF Code BibTeX
P2
Detecting and Filtering Unsafe Training Data via Data Attribution
Yijun Pan, Taiwei Shi, Jieyu Zhao, Jiaqi Ma
Arxiv Preprint (Preprint). 2025.
Project PDF BibTeX
P1
WildFeedback: Aligning LLMs With In-situ User Interactions And Feedback
Taiwei Shi, Zhuoer Wang, Longqi Yang, Ying-Chun Lin, Zexue He, Mengting Wan, Pei Zhou, Sujay Jauhar, Sihao Chen, Shan Xia, Hongfei Zhang, Jieyu Zhao, Xiaofeng Xu, Xia Song, Jennifer Neville
Arxiv Preprint (Preprint). 2024.
Project PDF BibTeX

Workshop

W1
Neural Story Planning
Anbang Ye, Christopher Cui, Taiwei Shi, Mark Riedl
Workshop on Creative AI at Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI Creative AI Workshop). 2023.
Project PDF BibTeX

Talks

Improving Online Moderation via Nonviolent Communication
Aug. 2022
USC Information Sciences Institute, NLP Seminar

Teaching

Spring 2025
Graduate Teaching Assistant
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
CSCI 699: Trustworthy Large Foundation Models, Instructor: Jieyu Zhao
Mentored student team projects for CSCI 699: Trustworthy Large Foundation Models, a PhD-level seminar course with 25 students enrolled.
Fall 2024
Graduate Teaching Assistant
University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
CSCI 467: Introduction to Machine Learning, Instructor: Jieyu Zhao
Designed homework and exam questions, held weekly office hours, and mentored student team projects.

Mentoring

Present - Fall 2024
Wendy Wu
B.S. in Computer Science, University of Southern California
Working on reinforcement finetuning (RFT)
Academic Achievement Award : University of Southern California
Present - Summer 2023
Yijun Pan
B.S. in Computer Science, University of Michigan
Working on detecting unsafe training data via data attribution

References

Dr. Jieyu Zhao, Assistant Professor
Language, Intelligence, and Model Ethics Lab
University of Southern California
Dr. Mark Riedl, Professor
Entertainment Intelligence and Human-Centered AI Lab
Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Diyi Yang, Assistant Professor
Stanford NLP Group
Stanford Univeristy

Contact

Taiwei Shi taiweish@usc.edu
Ginsburg Hall University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA, 90089
USA
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