Yining Lu

Hi There 👋! My name is Yining Lu, a second-year CS PhD student at the University of Notre Dame, where I am working with Prof. Meng Jiang in DM2: Data Mining towards Decision Making lab. Previously, I was an applied scientist intern at Amazon and graduate research assistant at Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing advised by Prof. Daniel Khashabi.

My research lies at the intersection of natural language processing and reinforcement learning, with a primary focus on the evaluation and optimization of generative models through the lens of RL methods and theory. To this end, I am currently working on research questions:

• Explainable and Trustworthy QA: How to better evaluate and generate high-quality rationales for QA tasks? [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• Multi-Objective Optimization: How can we develop more robust algorithms for aligning generative models with stronger Pareto optimality? [1, 2]

• Theoretical RL: How can RL theory help explain and address the fundamental challenges that arise in the training and inference of generative models? [1]

If you are interested in collaborating on these or similar ideas, feel free to drop me an email: ylu33 [at] nd.edu.