Xiang Ren
Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair and Associate Professor of Computer Science
Leads the INK lab on language model reasoning, commonsense knowledge and machine learning with language.
Xiang Ren's lab at USC works on large language models and reasoning & agents. 53 papers since 2023, 42 at top venues, mostly ACL and EMNLP. 10 PhD students. 78 alumni, most often to Microsoft and Google. Applications close .
At a glance
- papers, 2023–2026
- 14/ year
- at T1 venues
- 79%
- PhD students
- 10
- MS students
- 0
- alumni listed
- 78
Papers by yearfrom the lab homepage, 2023–2026
- 6 papers2026 · T1 6 · collecting
- 16 papers2025 · T1 11
- 14 papers2024 · T1 10
- 17 papers2023 · T1 15
T1 venuesOtherVenues: ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, NAACL
Research focuspaper titles that use each topic's words
- Large language models28 papers
- Reasoning & agents8 papers
- language model7 papers
- model reasoning0 papers
- commonsense0 papers
Paper list
From the lab homepage.
20266 papers
- ACL (T1)Believing without Seeing: Quality Scores for Contextualizing Vision-Language Model Explanations (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)DRInQ: Evaluating Conversational Implicature with Controlled Context Variation (opens in a new tab)
- ICLR (T1)Every Language Model Has a Forgery-Resistant Signature (opens in a new tab)
- ICLR (T1)Function induction and task generalization: An interpretability study with off-by-one addition (opens in a new tab)
- ICLR (T1)Lookahead tree-based rollouts for enhanced trajectory-level exploration in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (opens in a new tab)
- ICLR (T1)Segment-Level Attribution for Selective Learning of Long Reasoning Traces (opens in a new tab)
202516 papers
- EMNLP (T1)Amulet: Putting Complex Multi-Turn Conversations on the Stand with LLM Juries (opens in a new tab)
- ICLR (T1)Attributing Culture-Conditioned Generations to Pretraining Corpora (opens in a new tab)
- NeurIPS (T1)Better Language Model Inversion by Compactly Representing Next-Token Distributions (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of EMNLPCan VLMs Recall Factual Associations From Visual References? (opens in a new tab)
- NAACL (T1)CAVE: Controllable Authorship Verification Explanations (opens in a new tab)
- NeurIPS (T1)Demystifying Language Model Forgetting with Low-rank Example Associations (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)Diagnosing Memorization in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning, One Token at a Time (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of ACLELI-Why: Evaluating the Pedagogical Utility of Language Model Explanations (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of EMNLPImproving Language Model Personas via Rationalization with Psychological Scaffolds (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)Mixing Inference-time Experts for Enhancing LLM Reasoning (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)PrimeX: A dataset of worldview, opinion, and explanation (opens in a new tab)
- NAACL (T1)REL-A.I.: An Interaction-Centered Approach To Measuring Human-LM Reliance (opens in a new tab)
202414 papers
- Findings of ACLAre Machines Better at Complex Reasoning? Unveiling Human-Machine Inference Gaps in Entailment Verification (opens in a new tab)
- NAACL (T1)Backdooring Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models with Virtual Prompt Injection (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)Can LLMs Reason with Rules? Logic Scaffolding for Stress-Testing and Improving LLMs (opens in a new tab)
- COLMCULTURE-GEN: Revealing Global Cultural Perception in Language Models through Natural Language Prompting (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)In Search of the Long-Tail: Systematic Generation of Long-Tail Inferential Knowledge via Logical Rule Guided Search (opens in a new tab)
- Findings of NAACLInstruction-following Evaluation through Verbalizer Manipulation (opens in a new tab)
- COLMLogits of API-Protected LLMs Leak Proprietary Information (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)OATH-Frames: Characterizing Online Attitudes Towards Homelessness with LLM Assistants (opens in a new tab)
- ICLR (T1)PlaSma: Procedural Knowledge Models for Language-based Planning and Re-Planning (opens in a new tab)
- NeurIPS (T1)SELF-DISCOVER: Large Language Models Self-Compose Reasoning Structures (opens in a new tab)
- NeurIPS (T1)Stress-Testing Long-Context Language Models with Lifelong ICL and Task Haystack (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)Symbolic Working Memory Enhances Language Models for Complex Rule Application (opens in a new tab)
202317 papers
- ACL (T1)An AI Dungeon Master's Guide: Learning to Converse and Guide with Intents and Theory-of-Mind in Dungeons and Dragons (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)APOLLO: A Simple Approach for Adaptive Pretraining of Language Models for Logical Reasoning (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)Are Machine Rationales (Not) Useful to Humans? Measuring and Improving Human Utility of Free-text Rationales (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)CoNAL: Anticipating Outliers with Large Language Models (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)Cross-lingual Lifelong Learning (opens in a new tab)
- ICLR (T1)Dataless Knowledge Fusion by Merging Weights of Language Models (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)FiD-ICL: A Fusion-in-Decoder Approach for Efficient In-Context Learning (opens in a new tab)
- American Sociological ReviewHow New Ideas Diffuse in Science (opens in a new tab)
- EMNLP (T1)Inference-Time Policy Adapters (IPA): Tailoring Extreme-Scale LMs without Fine-tuning (opens in a new tab)
- TrustML-(un)Limited@ICLRKNIFE: Knowledge Distillation with Free-Text Rationales (opens in a new tab)
- AAAI (T1)On Grounded Planning for Embodied Tasks with Language Models (opens in a new tab)
- ACL (T1)PairReranker: Pairwise Learning to Rank for Decoding Language Models (opens in a new tab)
Where alumni went78 listed, 72% to industry
Industry 21Academia 8
Most often to
- Microsoft
- Meta
Also to
- USC
- Carnegie Mellon University
- CUHK
Apply to USCFall 2027
Computer Science PhD (Viterbi)
- Round
- Single round (Dec 15)
- Opens
- —
- GRE
- See program page
- English
- See program page
- Fee
- See program page
Confirmed on the program page.
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