Yong Zheng-Xin

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

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I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Brown University, advised by Prof. Stephen Bach. I am fortunate to have interned/collaborated with amazing researchers at Meta GenAI, FAIR, and Cohere Labs. My research interest is to create safe and intelligent systems to serve everyone in the world.

I currently work on understanding how reasoning training generalizes for safety alignment and multilinguality. Here are some recent work:

  • test-time scaling of multilingual reasoning with only English training (preprint).

I also actively 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 uses 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).

Previously, I worked 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 investigated how pretrained LLMs can learn low-resource languages through language adaptation (ACL 2023) and synthetic data (EMNLP 2024 Findings). Besides, I also studied language-mixing behaviors (EMNLP 2023 CALCS, EMNLP 2023 Findings, ACL 2023 Findings) and contributed to Southeast Asian NLP as a Malaysian (SEACrowd, CVQA, AACL 2023 Tutorial).

Actively seeking full-time research roles in industry.


Featured work/preprints (see all)

  1. Zheng-Xin Yong ,  Beyza Ermis ,  Marzieh Fadaee , and 2 more authors
    arxiv preprint, 2025
  2. Zheng-Xin Yong ,  M. Farid Adilazuarda ,  Jonibek Mansurov , and 7 more authors
    arxiv preprint, 2025
  3. Samuele Poppi ,  Zheng-Xin Yong ,  Yifei He , and 4 more authors
    NAACL Findings, 2025
  4. Xiaochen Li* ,  Zheng-Xin Yong* ,  and  Stephen H Bach
    EMNLP Findings, 2024
  5. Ahmet Üstün* ,  Viraat Aryabumi* ,  Zheng-Xin Yong* , and 14 more authors
    ACL, 2024 (Best Paper Award)
  6. Zheng-Xin Yong ,  Cristina Menghini ,  and  Stephen Bach
    NeurIPS Workshop: Socially Responsible Language Modelling Research (SoLaR) , 2023 (Best Paper Award)

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.