Ollie Liu

刘卓然 (Liú Zhuó-Rán) • he/him • me [at] [this-domain-url]

I’m a second-year Ph.D student in Computer Science at University of Southern California, fortunate to be co-advised by Prof. Dani Yogatama and Prof. Willie Neiswanger. In life, my friends call me Oliver 🫒

I am interested in multimodal foundation models (FM). My current research foci involve exploring and understanding their potential in facilitating scientific discovery. I am particularly excited about:

• Designing new architectures and algorithms that are broadly applicable to scientific modalities, such as (meta)genomics, protein, multiphysics, chemistry, and material sciences.
• Expanding methods in LLM post-training – such as preference learning and representation learning – to elicit controllable and interpretable behavior from multimodal scientific FMs.

Before USC, I was a researcher in continuous optimization with Prof. Jorge Nocedal at Northwestern University. Even before that, I did my B.S+M.S at Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in machine learning.

At USC, I co-lead the AI Safety Club, a student-run organization that advocates for safety in advanced AI systems. We run semester-long curriculums in introductory topics and technical areas.