Ollie Liu

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

I’m a third-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.

I’m 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, physics, protein, 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.