Zhiying (Gin) Jiang

"If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."

@Quinn drew this Don't Starve character of me


Hi, I’m Gin, a (recent) PhD graduate from University of Waterloo. During the flash ~3.5 years at UWaterloo, I was lucky enough to be supervised by Professor Jimmy Lin and to collaborate closely with Professor Ming Li. Before coming to Canada, I spent four years at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and did research at Blender, supervised by Professor Heng Ji. My research area focuses on interpretability and generalizability for machine learning.

On a high level, I’m mainly interested in understanding human learning and improving machine learning. My deep belief in the connection between compression and learning in general draws my interest towards the information theoretic approaches. Besides machine learning, I also love researching about food science and neuroscience.

In addition to research, I created AFAIK.io, a map of human knowledge with @Quinn.

Selected Publications

  1. ACL2023
    “Low-Resource” Text Classification: A Parameter-Free Classification Method with Compressors
    Jiang, Zhiying, Yang, Matthew, Tsirlin, Mikhail, Tang, Raphael, Dai, Yiqin, and Lin, Jimmy
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2023
  2. ACL2023
    What the DAAM: Interpreting Stable Diffusion Using Cross Attention
    Tang, Raphael, Liu, Linqing, Pandey, Akshat, Jiang, Zhiying, Yang, Gefei, Kumar, Karun, Stenetorp, Pontus, Lin, Jimmy, and Ture, Ferhan
    In Proceedings of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Best Paper Award, 2023
  3. NeurIPS2022
    Few-Shot Non-Parametric Learning with Deep Latent Variable Model
    Jiang, Zhiying, Dai, Yiqin, Xin, Ji, Li, Ming, and Lin, Jimmy
    In Proceedings of the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Spotlight. 2022
  4. BlackBoxNLP
    How Does BERT Rerank Passages? An Attribution Analysis with Information Bottlenecks
    Jiang, Zhiying, Tang, Raphael, Xin, Ji, and Lin, Jimmy
    In Proceedings of the Fourth BlackboxNLP Workshop on Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP 2021
  5. EMNLP2020
    Inserting Information Bottleneck for Attribution in Transformers
    Jiang, Zhiying, Tang, Raphael, Xin, Ji, and Lin, Jimmy
    In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Findings 2020
  6. EMNLP2020
    Document Ranking with a Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Model
    Nogueira, Rodrigo*, Jiang, Zhiying*, Pradeep, Ronak, and Lin, Jimmy
    In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Findings 2020