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

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Brown University, advised by Prof. Stephen Bach. I am also fortunate to have done research at Meta (FAIR and GenAI Safety Alignment), Cohere For AI, and BigScience. My broad research vision is to develop LLMs that are safe and helpful for everyone.
I work on safety alignment after discovering that low-resource languages can jailbreak GPT-4 (⭑Best Paper Award, NeurIPS 2023 Socially Responsible Language Modeling Workshop). This work pioneered multilingual red-teaming and was highlighted in the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI 2024. I also study cross-lingual generalization of both safety training (EMNLP 2024 Findings) and fine-tuning attacks (NAACL 2025 Findings). I also have industry experience red-teaming for frontier multilingual LLMs such as Aya (⭑Best Paper Award, ACL 2024).
I also work on developing multilingual LLMs, making them both safer and more helpful. I’ve helped develop Aya model (Cohere For AI) and T0 as well as BLOOM (BigScience). I also worked on low-resource NLP such as adapting LLMs to low-resource languages (ACL 2023), generating synthetic data for extremely low-resource languages (EMNLP 2024 Findings), and mitigating bias against out-of-distribution accents in speech models (to appear).
As a Malaysian, I also contributed to NLP for Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. I’ve hosted *ACL tutorials, helped curate SEACrowd data hub (EMNLP 2024), and studied how well LLMs can handle SEA linguistic phenomenon, such as code-switching (EMNLP 2023 CALCS Workshop), and understand culture in SEA region (NeurIPS 2024).
Other Misc Stuff:
- I went to Minerva University for my undergrad so I had the opportunity to travel and live in six different cities (for at least 4 months in each city) around the world: 🇺🇸 San Francisco, 🇰🇷 Seoul, 🇮🇳 Hyderabad, 🇩🇪 Berlin, 🇦🇷 Buenos Aires and 🇬🇧 London.
- My passion hobby is dancing 🕺, especially salsa and bachata. I also dance a bit of Lindy Hop, Argentine Tango and K-pop.
I usually check out the dance scenes in the city when I travel to conferences ––– if you also enjoy dancing, hmu we can check them out together.
selected publications (see all)
- Aya Model: An Instruction Finetuned Open-Access Multilingual Language ModelACL, 2024 (Best Paper Award)
- Low-Resource Languages Jailbreak GPT-4NeurIPS Workshop: Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR) , 2023 (Best Paper Award)
news
02 / 2025 | 1 paper accepted! Work on cross-lingual finetuning attacks is accepted to NAACL’25 findings. |
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09 / 2024 | 4 papers accepted! LexC-Gen and explanations of cross-lingual LLM toxicity reduction are accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2024. SEACrowd is also accepted to EMNLP 2024. CVQA is accepted to NeurIPS 2024 Datasets & Benchmarks. |
08 / 2024 | Aya Model paper received the ⭑Best Paper Award at ACL 2024. |
07 / 2024 | Gave a talk about multilingual AI safety at London Data Week (organized by The Alan Turing Institute and supported by Mayor of London). |
06 / 2024 | Meta AI: Started my research scientist internship at Meta AI (FAIR), working on Massively Multilingual Speech (MMS) models. Also collaborated with GenAI Trust Team on a multilingual safety project. |
05 / 2024 | 1 paper accepted! A Safe Harbor for AI Evaluation and Red Teaming is accepted to ICML 2024, accompanied with an open letter signed by 300+ researchers urging for legal and technical protections for AI red-teaming by independent researchers. |
02 / 2024 | Aya model and dataset papers are released! I presented Aya multilingual safety research at Aya Grand Finale. |
11 / 2023 | Co-organized the tutorial of 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 | Cohere For AI: Joining the Responsible Deployment Team for Aya red-teaming. |
05 / 2023 | Interviewed by Wired on our code-switching paper and grassroot research initiative for Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. |
05 / 2023 | 3 papers accepted! BLOOM+1, BLOOMZ and code-switching survey are accepted to ACL 2023. |
03 / 2022 | 2 papers accepted! T0 is accepted to ICLR 2022 (Spotlight) and its blog post is out! PromptSource is also accepted to ACL 2022 Demo track. |
06 / 2021 | Started PhD at Brown University. |