Yong Zheng-Xin
Current: Computer Science Ph.D. @ Brown University
Past: Research Scientist Intern @ Meta AI, Research Collaborator @ Cohere Labs

I am a PhD student at Brown University advised by Prof. Stephen Bach. I am fortunate to have interned/collaborated at Meta (GenAI, FAIR) and Cohere Labs.
I currently work on reasoning models. My recent work:
- We can monitor and even predict safety label before models finish thinking (preprint).
- Scaling test-time compute helps cross-lingual reasoning (preprint).
I also work on safety alignment. I discovered that low-resource languages can jailbreak GPT-4 (⭑Best Paper Award, NeurIPS 2023 SoLaR Workshop; featured on New Scientist), which became the seminal work for multilingual red-teaming. My follow-up work used mechanistic interpretability to study crosslingual generalization of detoxification alignment training (EMNLP 2024 Findings) and adversarial attacks (NAACL 2025 Findings). We also recently released a survey on multilingual AI safety (preprint).
In addition, I work on multilingual LLMs and low-resource NLP. I co-developed Aya model (⭑Best Paper Award, ACL 2024) and worked on making speech models robust to accents (INTERSPEECH 2025). I also studied how pretrained LLMs can learn low-resource languages effectively through language adaptation (ACL 2023) and synthetic data (EMNLP 2024 Findings), as well as how they naturally mix languages (i.e. code-switching) (EMNLP 2023 CALCS, EMNLP 2023 Findings, ACL 2023 Findings).
Actively seeking full-time research roles in industry.
Featured work/preprints (see all)
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- EMNLP Findings, 2024
- ACL, 2024 (Best Paper Award)
- NeurIPS Workshop: Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR) , 2023 (Best Paper Award)
news
07 / 2025 | Gave an invited talk at Google Multilinguality Reading Group. |
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05 / 2025 | Gave an invited talk at MilaNLP lab. |
05 / 2025 | 1 paper accepted! Work on understanding accent bias in ASR speech models was accepted to INTERSPEECH’25. Work was done during Meta internship. |
02 / 2025 | 1 paper accepted! Work on cross-lingual finetuning attacks was accepted to NAACL’25 findings. Work was done during Meta internship. |
09 / 2024 | 4 papers accepted! LexC-Gen, SEACrowd, and crosslingual alignment were accepted to EMNLP. CVQA was accepted to NeurIPS. |
08 / 2024 | Aya Model paper received the ⭑Best Paper Award at ACL 2024. |
07 / 2024 | Gave an invited talk at London Data Week. |
06 / 2024 | Started research scientist internship at Meta AI (FAIR)! |
05 / 2024 | 1 paper accepted! A Safe Harbor for AI Evaluation and Red Teaming is accepted to ICML. |
02 / 2024 | Released Aya model and dataset papers! I also presented Aya multilingual safety research at Aya Grand Finale. |
11 / 2023 | Co-organized the tutorial on current status of NLP in South East Asia at AACL 2023. |
10 / 2023 | “Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4” received the ⭑Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2023 Socially Responsible Language Modeling (SoLaR) workshop. |
09 / 2023 | Joined the Cohere For AI’s Responsible Deployment Team for Aya red-teaming. |
08 / 2023 | Served as the Area Chair (Multilingualism & Linguistic Diversity Track in EMNLP 2023). |
05 / 2023 | Media: Our code-switching paper was featured by Wired. |
05 / 2023 | 3 papers accepted! BLOOM+1, BLOOMZ and code-switching survey were accepted to ACL 2023. |
03 / 2022 | 2 papers accepted! T0 was accepted to ICLR (Spotlight). PromptSource was accepted to ACL Demo. |
06 / 2021 | Started PhD at Brown University. |
Miscellaneous
✈️ I lived in 6 different countries (USA, UK, S.Korea, Argentina, India, and Germany) for at least four months each when I studied at Minerva University.
🕺 I love dancing. I used to teach a bit of Lindy Hop and salsa. Also learned the full K-pop choreo of “Let’s kill this love” for my undergrad graduation.
👃 Used to work on lung cancer diagnosis research (Google Science Fair 2016 Finalist; work published on Journal of Thoracic Disease 2016 and featured on IEEE Spectrum) before pivoting to AI.