Zhepei “Bruce” Wei (魏哲培)

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Ph.D. Student
Computer Science Department
University of Virginia

Email: tqf5qb [AT] virginia [DOT] edu
[Google Scholar] [Github]

About me

Hello! My name is Zhepei (/dʒɜ:peɪ/) Wei, and I also go by Bruce. I am currently a second-year PhD student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, advised by Prof. Yu Meng. Prior to this, I received my B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Jilin University in 2019 and 2022. During the research journey, I was fortunate to have been advised by Prof. Hongning Wang and Prof. Yi Chang. I'm also a former research intern at Huawei Research.

For more information, please check my CV.

What's New

  • [01/2024] Our paper "Incentivized Truthful Communication for Federated Bandits" is accepted at ICLR 2024.

  • [09/2023] Our paper "Incentivized Communication for Federated Bandits" is accepted at NeurIPS 2023.

  • [10/2022] Our paper "Learning Semantic Textual Similarity via Topic-informed Discrete Latent Variables" is accepted at EMNLP 2022.

  • [09/2022] Our paper "Towards Unified Representations of Knowledge Graph and Expert Rules for Machine Learning and Reasoning" is accepted at AACL-IJCNLP 2022.

  • [08/2022] Moving to Charlottesville, and starting my PhD journey at UVa CS!

  • [04/2022] Our paper "AttExplainer: Explain Transformer via Attention by Reinforcement Learning" is accepted at IJCAI-ECAI 2022.

Research Interests

My recent research interest lies in the learning foundation of language model (LM) and its application in solving practical problems (e.g., information extraction, question answering, recommender system, etc.), with a focus on:

  • Retrieval-augmented LM

  • Textual Representation Learning

  • Trustworthy Language Generation and Reasoning

I also introduced the incentivized communication problem for contextual bandits (i.e., sequential decision-making agents) in federated environment (NeurIPS 2023, ICLR 2024).

Selected Awards

  • 2023. NeurIPS Scholar Award, NeurIPS Foundation.

  • 2022. Computer Science Scholar Fellowship, University of Virginia.

  • 2020. National Scholarship (Postgraduate), Ministry of Education of People's Republic of China.

  • 2020. Outstanding Postgraduate Award, Jilin University.

  • 2019. Outstanding Graduate Award, Jilin University.

  • 2018. National Scholarship (Undergraduate), Ministry of Education of People's Republic of China.

  • 2016~2018. Outstanding Undergraduate Award, Jilin University.