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1 </head> <body class="fixed-top-nav "> <header> <nav id="navbar" class="navbar navbar-light navbar-expand-sm fixed-top" role="navigation"> <div class="container"> <button class="navbar-toggler collapsed ml-auto" type="button" data-toggle="collapse" data-target="#navbarNav" aria-controls="navbarNav" aria-expanded="false" aria-label="Toggle navigation"> <span class="sr-only">Toggle navigation</span> <span class="icon-bar top-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar middle-bar"></span> <span class="icon-bar bottom-bar"></span> </button> <div class="collapse navbar-collapse text-right" id="navbarNav"> <ul class="navbar-nav ml-auto flex-nowrap"> <li class="nav-item active"> <a class="nav-link" href="/">about <span class="sr-only">(current)</span> </a> </li> <li class="nav-item "> <a class="nav-link" href="/blog/">blogs </a> </li> <li class="nav-item "> <a class="nav-link" href="/publications/">publications </a> </li> <li class="nav-item "> <a class="nav-link" href="/assets/pdf/CV_Yining_Lu.pdf">cv </a> </li> <li class="toggle-container"> <button id="light-toggle" title="Change theme"> <i class="ti ti-sun-moon" id="light-toggle-system"></i> <i class="ti ti-moon-filled" id="light-toggle-dark"></i> <i class="ti ti-sun-filled" id="light-toggle-light"></i> </button> </li> </ul> </div> </div> </nav> <progress id="progress" value="0"> <div class="progress-container"> <span class="progress-bar"></span> </div> </progress> </header> <div class="container mt-5" role="main"> <div class="post"> <header class="post-header"> <h1 class="post-title"> Yining Lu </h1> <p class="desc"><a href="https://cse.nd.edu/" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Department of Computer Science and Engineering </a>, <a href="https://www.nd.edu/" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">University of Notre Dame</a></p> </header> <article> <div class="profile float-right"> <figure> <picture> <source class="responsive-img-srcset" srcset="/assets/img/prof_pic.jpg" sizes="(min-width: 930px) 270.0px, (min-width: 576px) 30vw, 95vw"> <img src="/assets/img/prof_pic.jpg?6bf7a066cae1703f14bf2d80d3251e55" class="img-fluid z-depth-1 rounded" width="100%" height="auto" alt="prof_pic.jpg" loading="eager" onerror="this.onerror=null; $('.responsive-img-srcset').remove();"> </source></picture> </figure> <div class="more-info"> <p>150K Fitzpatrick Hall</p> <p>Notre Dame, IN 46556</p> </div> </div> <div class="clearfix"> <p>Hi There 👋! My name is Yining Lu, a third-year CS PhD student at the University of Notre Dame, where I am working with Prof. <a href="http://www.meng-jiang.com/" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Meng Jiang</a> in <a href="http://www.meng-jiang.com/lab.html" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">DM2: Data Mining towards Decision Making</a> lab. Previously, I was a research scientist intern at IBM Research (2026) and Amazon (2025).</p> <p>My research lies at the intersection of natural language processing and reinforcement learning, with a primary focus on the <strong>evaluation and optimization of generative models through the lens of RL methods and theory</strong>. To this end, I am currently working on research questions:</p> <ul> <li> <p><strong>Multi-Objective Optimization:</strong> How can we develop more robust algorithms for aligning generative models with stronger Pareto optimality? [<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15354" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11452" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">2</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38294" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">3</a>]</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Theoretical RL:</strong> How can RL theory help explain and address the fundamental challenges that arise in the training and inference of generative models? [<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06869" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">1</a>]</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Explainable and Trustworthy QA:</strong> How to better evaluate and generate high-quality rationales for QA tasks? [<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18678" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01044" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">2</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09007" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">3</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20091" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">

14</a>, <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.07577" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">5</a>]</p> </li> </ul> <p>If you are interested in collaborating on these or similar ideas, feel free to drop me an email: <code class="language-plaintext highlighter-rouge">ylu33 [at] nd.edu</code>.</p> </div> <h2> <a href="/news/" style="color: inherit">news</a> </h2> <div class="news"> <div class="table-responsive" style="max-height: 60vw"> <table class="table table-sm table-borderless"> <tr> <th scope="row" style="width: 20%">Sep 30, 2026</th> <td> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11452" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Learning to Optimize Multi-Objective Alignment Through Dynamic Reward Weighting</a> will be presented as an <span style="color: red;"><b>oral presentation</b></span> at EMNLP 2026 in Budapest! </td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row" style="width: 20%">Sep 29, 2026</th> <td> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38294" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">MoFlow: Multi-Objective Agentic Workflow Generation</a> was released on arXiv! </td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row" style="width: 20%">May 31, 2026</th> <td> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20091" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">CreativityPrism: A Holistic Benchmark for Large Language Model Creativity</a> was accepted to TMLR 2026! </td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row" style="width: 20%">May 25, 2026</th> <td> Joined IBM as a Research Scientist Intern for Summer 2026! </td> </tr> <tr> <th scope="row" style="width: 20%">Feb 16, 2026</th> <td> <a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11452" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Learning to Optimize Multi-Objective Alignment Through Dynamic Reward Weighting</a> was accepted to TACL! </td> </tr> </table> </div> </div> <h2> <a href="/publications/" style="color: inherit">selected publications</a> </h2> <div class="publications"> <ol class="bibliography"> <li> <div class="row"> <div class="col col-sm-2 abbr"> <abbr class="badge rounded w-100">TACL</abbr> </div> <div id="10.1162/TACL.a.696" class="col-sm-8"> <div class="title">Learning to Optimize Multi-Objective Alignment Through Dynamic Reward Weighting</div> <div class="author"> <em>Yining Lu</em>, Zilong Wang, Shiyang Li, Xin Liu, and <span class="more-authors" title="click to view 5 more authors" onclick=" var element=$(this); element.attr('title', ''); var more_authors_text=element.text() == '5 more authors' ? 'Changlong Yu, Qingyu Yin, Zhan Shi, Zixuan Zhang, Meng Jiang' : '5 more authors'; var cursorPosition=0; var textAdder=setInterval(function(){ element.html(more_authors_text.substring(0, cursorPosition + 1)); if (++cursorPosition == more_authors_text.length){ clearInterval(textAdder); } }, '10'); ">5 more authors</span> </div> <div class="periodical"> <em>Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics</em>, Jun 2026 </div> <div class="periodical"> <span style="color: red;"><b>Oral Presentation at EMNLP 2026 Budapest, Hungary</b></span> </div> <div class="links"> <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11452" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">arXiv</a> <a href="https://github.com/yining610/dynamic-reward-weighting" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Code</a> <a href="https://yining610.github.io/dynamic-reward-weighting-webpage/" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button">Website</a> </div> </div> </div> </li> <li> <div class="row"> <div class="col col-sm-2 abbr"> <abbr class="badge rounded w-100">ACL</abbr> </div> <div id="lu2025optimizingdecompositionoptimalclaim" class="col-sm-8"> <div class="title">Optimizing Decomposition for Optimal Claim Verification</div> <div class="author"> <em>Yining Lu</em>, Noah Ziems, Hy Dang, and Meng Jiang </div> <div class="periodical"> <em>In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics</em>, Jun 2025 </div> <div class="periodical"> </div> <div class="links"> <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15354" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">arXiv</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgloG4Oefeg" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Video</a> <a href="https://github.com/yining610/dynamic-decomposition" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Code</a> </div> </div> </div> </li> <li> <div class="row"> <div class="col col-sm-2 abbr"> <abbr class="badge rounded w-100">NAACL</abbr> </div> <div id="lu-etal-2025-benchmarking" class="col-sm-8"> <div class="title">Benchmarking Language Model Creativity: A Case Study on Code Generation</div> <div class="author"> <em>Yining Lu</em>, Dixuan Wang, Tianjian Li, Dongwei Jiang, and <span class="more-authors" title="click to view 3 more authors" onclick=" var element=$(this); element.attr('title', ''); var more_authors_text=element.text() == '3 more authors' ? 'Sanjeev Khudanpur, Meng Jiang, Daniel Khashabi' : '3 more authors'; var cursorPosition=0; var textAdder=setInterval(function(){ element.html(more_authors_text.substring(0, cursorPosition + 1)); if (++cursorPosition == more_authors_text.length){ clearInterval(textAdder); } }, '10'); ">3 more authors</span> </div> <div class="periodical"> <em>In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)</em>, Jun 2025 </div> <div class="periodical"> </div> <div class="links"> <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09007" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">arXiv</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1cHyCcTm6A" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Video</a> <a href="https://github.com/JHU-CLSP/NeoCoder" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Code</a> </div> </div> </div> </li> <li> <div class="row"> <div class="col col-sm-2 abbr"> <abbr class="badge rounded w-100">ACL</abbr> </div> <div id="jiang-etal-2024-rora" class="col-sm-8"> <div class="title">RORA: Robust Free-Text Rationale Evaluation</div> <div class="author"> Zhengping Jiang<sup>*</sup>, <em>Yining Lu<sup>*</sup></em>, Hanjie Chen, Daniel Khashabi, and <span class="more-authors" title="click to view 2 more authors" onclick=" var element=$(this); element.attr('title', ''); var more_authors_text=element.text() == '2 more authors' ? 'Benjamin Van Durme, Anqi Liu' : '2 more authors'; var cursorPosition=0; var textAdder=setInterval(function(){ element.html(more_authors_text.substring(0, cursorPosition + 1)); if (++cursorPosition == more_authors_text.length){ clearInterval(textAdder); } }, '10'); ">2 more authors</span> </div> <div class="periodical"> <em>In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics</em>, Jun 2024 </div> <div class="periodical"> </div> <div class="links"> <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18678" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">arXiv</a> <a href="https://github.com/zipJiang/RORA" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Code</a> </div> </div> </div> </li> <li> <div class="row"> <div class="col col-sm-2 abbr"> <abbr class="badge rounded w-100">EACL</abbr> </div> <div id="lu-etal-2024-gear" class="col-sm-8"> <div class="title">GEAR: Augmenting Language Models with Generalizable and Efficient Tool Resolution</div> <div class="author"> <em>Yining Lu<sup>*</sup></em>, Haoping Yu<sup>*</sup>, and Daniel Khashabi </div> <div class="periodical"> <em>In Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics</em>, Jun 2024 </div> <div class="periodical"> </div> <div class="links"> <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/2307.08775" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">arXiv</a> <a href="https://github.com/yining610/GEAR" class="btn btn-sm z-depth-0" role="button" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Code</a> </div> </div> </div> </li> </ol> </div> <div class="social"> <div class="contact-icons"> <a href="mailto:%79%6C%75%33%33@%6E%64.%65%64%75" title="email"><i class="fa-solid fa-envelope"></i></a> <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=V2kb41AAAAAJ" title="Google Scholar" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i class="ai ai-google-scholar"></i></a> <a href="https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2146424602" title="Semantic Scholar" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i class="ai ai-semantic-scholar"></i></a> <a href="https://github.com/yining610" title="GitHub" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i class="fa-brands fa-github"></i></a> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/yining-lu-aa4a79286" title="LinkedIn" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i class="fa-brands fa-linkedin"></i></a> <a href="https://twitter.com/Yining__Lu" title="X" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><i class="fa-brands fa-x-twitter"></i></a> <a href="/feed.xml" title="RSS Feed"><i class="fa-solid fa-square-rss"></i></a> </div> <div class="contact-note">Feel free to reach out to me via email or any of the social media above. </div> </div> </article> </div> </div> <footer class="fixed-bottom" role="contentinfo"> <div class="container mt-0"> © Copyright 2026 Yining Lu. 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