Hello! My name is Qinyuan Ye (叶沁媛). I am a Research Scientist at Salesforce AI Research.

I obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Xiang Ren. I was part of INK Lab and the USC NLP community. Prior to USC, I was an undergraduate student at Tsinghua University, majoring in Automation.

I am interested in enabling NLP and AI systems to learn efficiently and proactively. Towards this, I develop methods that enable these systems to

• Take in diverse forms of contexts and supervision signals
• Accumulate learning experiences and generalize across tasks
• Plan and direct themselves to learn

These research efforts are often linked to fields such as meta-learning, in-context learning, and instruction tuning.

Recent News

[Sep 2025] Our interpretability work is accepted to the Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop at NeurIPS 2025.

[Sep 2025] My thesis Cross-Task Generalization Abilities of Large Language Models is available on the USC Digital Library.

[Sep 2025] I presented our interpretability work at Cohere Labs! [Slides] [Video]

[Aug 2025] I joined Salesforce! I’ll be based in the Palo Alto office.

Preprint

Function Induction and Task Generalization: An Interpretability Study with Off-by-One Addition.
Qinyuan Ye, Robin Jia, Xiang Ren
[Preprint] [Github] [Tweet]

Selected Publications

Stress-Testing Long-Context Language Models with Lifelong ICL and Task Haystack
Xiaoyue Xu*, Qinyuan Ye*, Xiang Ren
In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2024 (Datasets and Benchmarks Track).
Short Version at Workshop on Long Context Foundation Models @ ICML 2024.
[Paper] [Github] [Website] [Poster] [Tweet]

Prompt Engineering a Prompt Engineer
Qinyuan Ye, Maxamed Axmed, Reid Pryzant, Fereshte Khani
In Proceedings of ACL 2024 (Findings).
[Paper] [Github] [Video] [Slides] [Poster] [Tweet]

How Predictable Are Large Language Model Capabilities? A Case Study on BIG-bench
Qinyuan Ye, Harvey Yiyun Fu, Xiang Ren, Robin Jia
In Proceedings of EMNLP 2023 (Findings).
[Paper] [Github] [Video] [Slides] [Poster] [Tweet]

CrossFit: A Few-shot Learning Challenge for Cross-task Generalization in NLP
Qinyuan Ye, Bill Yuchen Lin, Xiang Ren
In Proceedings of EMNLP 2021.
[Paper] [Github] [Video] [Slides (Qual Exam Version)]

Talks

Function Induction and Task Generalization: An Interpretability Study with Off-by-One Addition Sep 2025, Cohere Labs
[Slides] [Video]

Cross-Task Generalization Abilities of Large Language Models
Jul 2024, USC WiSE STEM Bytes Seminar
Mar 2025, Allen Institute for AI
Mar 2025, Salesforce AI Research

Learning from Observations of Large Language Model Capabilities
Nov 2023, Fudan NLP Group
[Slides]

Acquiring and Understanding Cross-task Generalization from Diverse NLP Tasks
Oct 2022, USC ISI Natural Language Seminar
[Video]

Acquiring Cross-task Generalization from Diverse NLP Tasks
Feb 2022, NEC Labs Europe

Teaching

I love teaching! I was fortunate to serve as a teaching assistant for these amazing classes:

Fall 2022, CSCI 699, Date-Centric NLP
Instructor: Prof. Swabha Swayamdipta

Spring 2023, CSCI 467, Introduction to Machine Learning
Instructor: Prof. Robin Jia

Spring 2025, CSCI 360, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
Instructor: Prof. Ruishan Liu

I gave guest lectures on Prompting and Instruction Tuning for CSCI 499, Language Models in NLP [Slides] and CSCI 662, Advanced Natural Language Processing [Slides] in Fall 2023.

Internships

May 2023 - Aug 2023, Research Intern,
@ Office of Applied Research, Microsoft, Redmond, WA, U.S.

May 2022 - Aug 2022, Research Intern,
@ AllenNLP, Allen Institute for AI, Seattle, WA, U.S.

May 2021 - Aug 2021, Research Intern (Remote),
@ AI Integrity, Facebook, Seattle, WA, U.S.

May 2020 - Aug 2020, Research Intern (Remote),
@ AI Integrity, Facebook, Seattle, WA, U.S.

Mar 2019 - Jul 2019, Software Engineering Intern in Machine Learning,
@ TensorFlow Lite, Google, Beijing, China.

Awards and Honors

Mar 2022, Finalist for Two Sigma Diversity PhD Fellowship.
Nov 2021, WiSE Qualcomm Top-Off Fellowship, University of Southern California.
Feb 2019, Annenberg Fellowship, University of Southern California.
Oct 2017 and Oct 2018, China National Scholarship.
Oct 2016, POSCO Asia Fellowship.
July 2014, Bronze Medal, China National Olympiad in Informatics.

Miscellaneous

I am from Chongming Island, Shanghai, China. We have delicious crabs and sticky rice cakes in Chongming!
I played volleyball at Tsinghua. I also hold the record of 2kg solid ball casting at Tsinghua.
I completed my first half marathon in April 2025! :D
I support Wigs For Kids with my hair!