Aaron Chan
PhD Candidate at USC • aarzchan 
gmail 
com
Hi! 
I’m a computer science PhD candidate in the INK Lab at the University of Southern California (USC), advised by Prof. Xiang Ren. I’m also a member of USC’s Information Sciences Institute (ISI).
My research is at the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning. In particular, I’m excited about:
- model explainability: explaining language model behavior more faithfully, plausibly, and efficiently.
- explanation-based learning: operationalizing explanations to improve language model generalization and decision-making.
In the past, I’ve worked as a research intern at Meta AI and an engineering intern at Google.
Before coming to USC, I earned a master’s degree in robotics from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Currently, I’m based in the Washington, DC metro area, where I live with my wife. Outside of work, you might find me playing/watching basketball (go Wizards!), skiing, hiking, board gaming, or foodie-ing (
). Plus, I’m a huge fan of the TV shows Seinfeld and BoJack Horseman.
News
| Jul 18, 2022 |
I’m in Baltimore this week for ICML 2022!  I’ll be presenting UNIREX on July 19.
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| Jul 10, 2022 |
I’m in Seattle this week for NAACL 2022! I’ll be presenting ER-Test with Brihi Joshi at the TrustNLP Workshop on July 14.
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| May 15, 2022 |
UNIREX was accepted to ICML 2022! 
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| May 10, 2022 |
After completing my PhD in Fall 2022, I’ll be joining Meta AI as a research scientist! 
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| May 09, 2022 |
ER-Test was accepted to the TrustNLP Workshop @ NAACL 2022! 
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| Apr 30, 2022 | I’m presenting UNIREX today at the Socially Responsible ML Workshop @ ICLR 2022. Come find me at Poster D2! |
| Mar 31, 2022 |
UNIREX was accepted to the BigScience Workshop @ ACL 2022!
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| Mar 27, 2022 |
UNIREX was accepted to the Socially Responsible ML Workshop @ ICLR 2022!
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| Mar 11, 2022 |
I passed my PhD thesis proposal!  Check out my slides here.
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| Jan 10, 2022 | In Spring 2022, I’m a TA for CSCI 566 (Deep Learning and its Applications) at USC. |
| Dec 16, 2021 | A preprint of my Meta AI intern project, UNIREX, is now up on arXiv. |
| Dec 09, 2021 | I’m presenting SalKG today at NeurIPS 2021. Come chat with me at Poster Session 7! |
| Sep 28, 2021 |
SalKG was accepted to NeurIPS 2021!
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| Sep 20, 2021 |
I started my research internship at |
| Jul 31, 2021 | This summer, I had an awesome time mentoring Wyatt Lake, as part of USC’s SHINE program. Check out Wyatt’s project on explanation-based regularization of BERT models. |