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’m broadly interested in multimodal foundation models. These days, I’m exploring their potential as agents of complex reasoning and scientific discovery. I’m particularly excited about:

• Designing and understanding architectures and algorithms that are applicable to scientific modalities, such as (meta)genomics, protein, physics, chemistry, and material sciences.
• Developing post-training and inference-time methods that enable FMs to solve complex reasoning and decision making problems.

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.