• [2025/10] Talk at Columbia University NLP Seminar on From Large Language Models to Large Agent Models: Reasoning Interface with World Modeling.
• [2025/10] Talk at University of Pennsylvania NLP Seminar on "From Large Language Models to Large Agent Models: Reasoning Interface with World Modeling".
• [2025/10] Talk at Capital One on "Conversational Agent Training".
• [2025/10] Talk at Amazon on "Conversational Agent Training".
• [2025/10] Interview by MIT Tech Review on Deepseek-OCR.
• [2025/10] Invited by Dreamforce 2025 as a panelist on AI Research Faculty Panel.
• [2025/10] Tutorial at ICCV 2025 on Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents.
• [2025/10] Tutorial at ICCV 2025 on Safe Multi-Modal Learning.
• [2025/10] Talk at ICCV 2025 Workshop on Multimodal Reasoning for Agentic Intelligence (MMRAgI).
• [2025/10] Talk at ICCV 2025 Workshop on Multimodal Spatial Intelligence (MUSI).
• [2025/10] Talk at ICCV 2025 Workshop on Memory and Vision (MemVis).
• [2025/10] Talk at ICCV 2025 Workshop on Long Multi-Scene Video Foundations (LongVid-Foundations) on "Re-thinking Temporal Search for Long-Form Video Understanding".
• [2025/10] Talk at ICCV 2025 Workshop on Structural Priors for Vision (SP4V) for the Best Paper Award on Spatial Mental Modeling from Limited Views.
• [2025/09] Talk at University of Edinburgh CHAI Seminar Series on "RAGEN: Training Agents by Reinforcing Reasoning".
• [2025/09] Talk at Stanford University on "Theory of Space: How LLMs develop spatial internal beliefs".
• [2025/09] Talk at Agentic AI Frontier Seminar on "RAGEN: Training Agents by Reinforcing Reasoning".
• [2025/08] Talk at Agent AI Summit at UC Berkeley on "RAGEN: Training Agents by Reinforcing Reasoning".
• [2025/08] Talk at Stanford University on "LLM Alignment with Control Barrier Functions".
• [2025/07] Talk at Cross Future AI Summit on "See, Think, Act: Agent Training By Reinforcement Reasoning".
• [2025/07] Talk at CVPR 2025 Workshop on Visual Concepts on "Why is Spatial Concept Learning Hard?".
• [2025/07] Talk at Apple Workshop on Reasoning and Planning on "Training Agents with World Model Reasoning".
• [2025/07] Talk at ACC 2025 Workshop on LLMs in Control Design and Decision Making on "LLMs for Embodied Decision Making".
• [2025/06] Talk at Midwest Machine Learning Symposium 2025 on "RAGEN: Training Agents by Reinforcing Reasoning".
• [2025/05] Talk at Google DeepMind on "RAGEN: Training Agents by Reinforcing Reasoning".
• [2025/05] Talk at NAACL 2025 Workshop onKnowledge-Augmentation for Language Models and NLP Methods on "RAGEN: Training Agents by Reinforcing Reasoning".
• [2025/05] Tutorial at NAACL 2025 on Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents.
• [2025/04] Talk at UIUC NLP Seminar on "RAGEN: Training Agents by Reinforcing Reasoning".
• [2025/04] Guest Lecture at University of Michigan EECS 692 Advanced Artificial Intelligence on "Reasoning and Planning with Physical World".
• [2025/02] Talk at AAAI 2025 New Faculty Highlights on "Agent Training Under a MDP Formulation".
• [2025/02] Talk at AAAI 2025 Workshop on LM4Plan on "Agent Training Under a MDP Formulation".
• [2025/02] Talk at AAAI 2025 Bridge on Foundation Models and Planning on "Agent Training Under a MDP Formulation".
• [2025/02] Tutorial at AAAI 2025 on Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents [Website/Slides].
• [2025/02] Tutorial at AAAI 2025 on Lifecycle of Knowledge in LLMs: Memorization, Editing, and Beyond [Website/Slides].
• [2024/12] Talk at SFU @ NeurIPS 2024 on "Embodied Agent Interface: LLMs and VLMs for Embodied Reasoning and Planning".
• [2024/11] Talk at EMNLP 2024 Birds of a Feather on "LLMs for Embodied Agents".
• [2024/11] Talk at EMNLP 2024 CustomNLP4U Workshop on "Customizing Large Language Models to Embodied Agents".
• [2024/10] Talk at Adobe Research on "Chart Reasoning Agents".
• [2024/09] Keynote at Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences Fall Research Symposium 2024 on "From Large Language Models to Large Agent Models".
• [2024/09] Talk at 2024 Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing on "Reasoning and Planning with Physical World Knowledge".
• [2024/08] Talk at TTIC Multimodal AI Workshop 2024 on "Embodied Agent Interface: LLMs for Embodied Decision Making".
• [2024/08] Talk at Summer Institute in Computational Social Science 2024 on "Multimodal Knowledge for Social Good".
• [2024/08] Tutorial at IJCAI 2024 on Beyond Human Creativity: A Tutorial on Advancements in AI Generated Content (AIGC) [Website/Slides].
• [2024/07] Talk at SpLU-RoboNLP 2024 Workshop on "Reasoning, Planning and Compositionality in Multimodality".
• [2024/07] Talk at Adobe Research on "Visually Descriptive Language Modeling for Document Intelligence".
• [2024/06] Talk at Apple NLU Workshop 2024 on "From Large Language Models to Large Agent Models".
• [2024/06] Talk at UIUC NLP Seminar on "From Words to Worlds: A Close Look to Diffusion Models (through an NLP Lens)".
• [2024/05] Talk at Midwest Machine Learning Symposium 2024 on "The Missing Knowledge in LLMs to Interact with the Physical World".
• [2024/05] Tutorial at NAACL 2025 on Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents [Website/Slides].
• [2023/12] Keynote at NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on New Frontiers in Graph Learning on "Beyond the Beaten Path: Exploring the Role of Graphs in Multimodal Foundation Models".
• [2023/11] Tutorial at ICAIF 2023 on Large Language Models for NLP in Finance [Slides].
• [2023/10] Talk at Stanford Vision and Learning Seminar on "LLMs for robotics: Modeling the Knowledge of the Physical World".
• [2023/10] Talk at Adobe Research on "Knowledge Foundation Models".
• [2023/06] Talk at Stanford CogAI on "Modeling the Semantics of the Physical World".
• [2023/06] Tutorial at CVPR 2023 on Knowledge-Driven Vision-Language Encoding [Website/Slides/Videos] [Reading List].
• [2023/04] Talk "Towards Factuality in Information Access: Multimodal Knowledge Acquisition and Reasoning" at UCLA ECE.
• [2023/03] Talk "Towards Factuality in Information Access: Multimodal Knowledge Acquisition and Reasoning" at University of Virginia CS; MBZUAI; Washington University in St. Louis CS; University of Toronto CS+ECE; UC Davis CS.
• [2023/02] Talk "Towards Factuality in Information Access: Multimodal Knowledge Acquisition and Reasoning" at Carnegie Mellon University LTI; Northwestern University CS; Northeastern University ECE; Purdue University CS; Rice University CS; Virginia Tech CS; Max Planck Institute; UC San Diego ECE.
• [2023/02] Tutorial at AAAI 2023 on Knowledge-Driven Vision-Language Pretraining [Website/Slides/Videos] [Reading List].
• [2022/10] Talk "From Entity-Centric to Event-Centric Multimodal Event Knowledge Acquisition" at EECS Rising Stars, University of Texas at Austin.
• [2022/10] Talk "Towards Accurate Intelligent Analysis: Event-Centric Multimedia Knowledge Extraction" at DARPA Forward (Invite-Only).
• [2022/10] Talk "Event-Centric Multimedia Data Understanding" at Ohio State University; Singapore Management University; George Mason University; North Carolina State University.
• [2022/09] Talk "Multimedia Event Extraction: From Object-Centric to Event-Centric" at Virginia Tech.
• [2022/08] Talk "Event Knowledge Graph Construction" at LOGS Graph Reasoning Seminar.
• [2022/07] Tutorial at NAACL 2022 on New Frontiers of Information Extraction [Website/Slides/Videos] [PDF].
• [2022/06] Talk "Event Graph Structures in Vision-Language Understanding" at DataFun.
• [2022/04] Talk "Connecting Vision and Text using Event Structures" at NewsBreak.
• [2022/02] Talk "Memories as Repositories of Events: Structural Event Knowledge Acquisition" at University of Notre Dame.
• [2021/12] Talk "Comprehensive Event Understanding in Multimedia Data" at USC ISI.
• [2021/11] Talk "Structural Event Knowledge Acquisition from Multimedia Data" at UIUC NLP Seminar.
• [2021/11] Talk "Event Extraction and Reasoning in Multimedia News Data" at Microsoft Research.
• [2021/08] Talk "Improving Visual Event and Argument Role Understanding with Contrastive Image-Language Pretraining" at Microsoft Research.
• [2021/08] Tutorial at ACL 2021 on Event-centric Natural Language Understanding [Website/Slides/Videos] [PDF].
• [2021/02] Tutorial at AAAI 2021 on Event-centric Natural Language Processing [Website/Slides/Videos] [PDF].
• [2020/10] Talk "Fine-Grained Knowledge Extraction System from Multimedia Data" at ai.science.
• [2020/05] Talk "Event Understanding and Narration for Multimedia Data" at Intel MDI Research Lab.

• Organizing Committee
  • ACL 2025 (Virtual Infrastructure Chairs)
  • NAACL 2025 (Publication Chairs) summary
  • EMNLP 2024 (Demonstration Chairs) summary
  • Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents @ CVPR 2025 workshop
  • Towords Knowledgeable Foundation Models @ ACL 2025 workshop
  • Towords Knowledgeable Foundation Models @ AAAI 2025 workshop
  • Towords Knowledgeable Foundation Models @ ACL 2024 workshop
  • Knowledge Discovery from Unstructured Data in Financial Services (KDF) @ SIGIR 2023 Workshop
• Senior Area Chair: EMNLP (from 2025)
• Area Chair: ACL (from 2023), EMNLP (from 2023), NAACL (from 2024), COLM (from 2025)
• Program Committee: ARR (ACL Rolling Review, from 2021), ACL (from 2021), EMNLP (from 2021), NAACL-HLT (from 2021), AAAI (from 2021), WWW (from 2021), AKBC (2021), EACL (from 2021), KDD DI Workshop (2021), NLPCC (2021), COLING (from 2020), AACL (from 2020), CCL (from 2020)
• Journal Reviewer: TACL, TIST, TKDE
• Community Services
  • ACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) Mentor, ACL, 2024
  • ACM Mentor, ACM Mentorship Program at UIUC, 2022
  • CS Ambassador, UIUC CS Visit Day for Prospective Graduate Students, 2022
  • Advising Assistant, UIUC PhD Orientation Seminar, 2021
  • Graduate Student Representative, UIUC CS Visit Day, 2020

Research Awards

• ACL Inaugural Best Desseratation Award Honorable Mention, 2025
• MIT Tech Review 35 Under 35 Global List, 2025
• Best Paper Award at AAAI 2026 Workshop on Trustworthy Agentic Systems
• Outstanding Paper Award at AAAI 2026 Workshop on Personalization in the Era of Large Foundation Models
• Best Paper Award at RSS 2025 workshop on Continual Robot Learning from Humans
• Best Paper Honorable Mention at NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Language Agents and World Models
• Best Paper Award at ICCV 2025 workshop on Structural Priors for Vision
• Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2024
• Best Paper Award at SoCal NLP 2024
• Best Demo Paper Award at NAACL 2021
• Best Demo Paper Award at ACL 2020
• Best Poster Award at Midwest Machine Learning Symposium 2025
• AAAI 2025 New Faculty Highlights
• Microsoft Research Postdoc Fellowship 2023
• EE CS Rising Star 2022
• DARPA Riser 2022
• Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship 2021
• Mavis Future Faculty Fellow
• C.L. and Jane Liu Award
• National Scholarship

Student Awards

• Bloomberg Data Science Ph.D. Fellowship (Canyu Chen)
• Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship Finalist (Zihan Wang)
• Northwestern Murphy Fellowship (Zihan Wang, Qineng Wang, Kangrui Wang, Pingyue Zhang, Canyu Chen)

Academic and Scientific Competitions

• Ranked 1st in NIST TAC Streaming Multimedia Knowledge Base Population (SM-KBP) 2020
• Ranked 1st in NIST TAC Streaming Multimedia Knowledge Base Population (SM-KBP) 2019, with more than 10% absolute gains compared the second ranked team

Instructor:

• COMP_SCI 396 Reasoning and Planning in the Foundation Model Era
  NU, Winter 2025
• COMP_SCI 496 Agentic AI
  NU, Spring 2025

Guest Lecturer:

• Navigating Up and Down in the Job Searching
  COMP_SCI 496 Academic Job Search
  NU, Fall 2023
• Event-Centric Multimedia Encoding
  CS 6604 Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing
  Virginia Tech, Fall 2022
• Knowledge-Driven Vision-Language Pretraining
  CS 546 Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing
  UIUC, Fall 2022
• Recent Advances in Multimedia Encoding
  CS 546 Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing
  UIUC, Fall 2022
• Timeline Summarization: Introducing Temporal Dimensions into Summarization
  CS 598 Knowledge Driven Natural Language Generation
  UIUC, Spring 2022
• Multimedia Encoding via Vision-Language Pretraining
  CS 546 Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing
  UIUC, Fall 2021