Emmy Liu

Hello! I’m a final-year PhD student in the Language Technologies Institute at CMU, where I’m advised by Graham Neubig. Before coming to CMU, I did my undergrad at the University of Toronto. My CV is here. I’ve also interned with Meta and Google Deepmind, and was fortunate to work with Chenyan Xiong, Scott Wen-tau Yih, and Lucio Dery. I have also visited the Lingo lab at MIT in the summer of 2023, and worked with Jacob Andreas there.

I’m working on building the developmental science of language models: understanding how capabilities emerge, change, and interact over the course of training. I study the impact of training decisions on the ultimate performance and capabilities of models and hope to improve the scientific understanding of training processes. Questions include, but are not limited to: what do models learn, in what order, and how can we intervene to improve particular capabilities without compromising others? This perspective draws inspiration from human cognitive development while treating model development as a subject of study in its own right.

I’m grateful to be supported by the SoftBank Group–Arm Fellowship. I am also grateful for the support of the NSERC PGS-D Fellowship, CMU Presidential Fellowship and NEC Fellowship in the past. You can contact me at emmy@cmu.edu if you’re interested in collaborating or chatting about research.