Jianguo Zhang 张建国

Ph.D in Computer Science

University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC),
Chicago, IL, U.S.

Email: jianguozhang@salesforce.com (Note: jzhan51@uic.edu is deactivated by UIC)


I am a Senior Research Scientist at Salesforce AI Research and a recipient of the 2024 Annual T&P (Technology and Product) All-Star Awards, awarded to the top 1% with approximately 150 winners across Technology. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I was advised by Prof. Philip S. Yu in the BDSC Lab. My current research primarily focuses on AI Agents and Conversational AI. Specifically, my work involves:
  • Large-scale and advanced data collection, processing, synthesis, verification, and more.
  • Training large action models and designing AI agents.
  • Creating end-to-end dialogue systems, with an emphasis on accurate natural language understanding and dialogue state tracking without complicated pipelines.


  • News

  • Sep 2024: Check our latest work xLAM: A Family of Large Action Models to Empower AI Agent Systems, which demonstrates top-tier performance across multiple challenging benchmarks and scenarios. Explore more through the xLAM GitHub Repo, HuggingFace Model Collections and Project Webpage.
  • July 2024: Happy to contribute to the work Consent in Crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons. See also the New York Times and Twitter.
  • June 2024: Check our new work APIGen, the best open-sourced models for function calling. Our dataset xlam-function-calling-60k is currently among the Top-2 trending datasets on HuggingFace, standing out in a field of 176,238 datasets as of July 11, 2024. See also the Twitter by Salesforce CEO, VentureBeat and 新智元.
  • March 2024: xLAM Repository and xLAM v0.1 Model are released! Try it together with AgentLite benchmark or other benchamrks, which is comparable to GPT-4! See also the Paper and Twitter by Salesforce AI Research VP.
  • Dec 2023: DialogStudio Repository has garnered 400 stars. DialogStudio Data has more than 55k downloads and was previously ranked among the Top-10 trending datasets! See also the Paper and Twitter.
  • Jan 2022: I will join Salesforce AI Research as a Research Scientist.
  • Sep 2021: Finished my internship at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). The project focuses on few-shot end-to-end task-oriented dialgue systems.
  • Aug 2021: Two paper are accepted by EMNLP 2021 main conference as short papers. One first-author work collaborates with Adobe Research and it focuses on natural language understanding.
  • June 2021: Check our new released paper and public resources for few-shot intent detection w/ and w/o out-of-scope queries.
  • May 2021: I finished my internship at Adobe Research and submitted one research paper, where I also discover PhotoShop user intents and improve intent detection performance using large-scale unlabeled PhotoShop user queries.
  • Dec 2020: Our toolkit NaturalCC has been released in GitHub, which can be accessed via the Homepage.
  • Nov 2020: We have released the paper, video for the EMNLP 2020 paper, and the corresponding code is available here!
  • Sep 2020: One first-author work collaborated with Salesforce Research is accepted by *SEM 2020 as a long paper. The work focuses on multi-domain dialog state tracking and it originally got borderline scores on ACL 2020. We have updated the paper!
  • Sep 2020: One first-author work collaborated with Salesforce Research is accepted by EMNLP 2020 main conference as a long paper. The work focuses on natural language understanding.
  • June 2020: One work collaborated with Google Research is accepted by ACL 2020 NLP4ConvAI, and the modified high-quality version of MultiWOZ 2.2 dataset with additional annotation corrections and state tracking baselines is released here!
  • Open Sources

    xLAM | AgentLite | DialogStudio | MultiWOZ |Data Provenance | NaturalCC

    Publications

    Last Update: Aug. 2024



    Experience

    Facebook AI Research (FAIR), New York, US

           Research Intern,   June 2021 - Sep. 2021

           Mentor: Stephen Roller

    Adobe Research, San Jose, US

           Research Intern,   Mar. 2021 - May 2021

           Collaborators: Trung Bui, David Seunghyun Yoon and Walter Chang.

    Salesforce Research, Palo Alto, US

           Research Intern,   Spring 2019 - Summer 2020

           Mentors: Kazuma Hashimoto, Caiming Xiong, Chien-Sheng Wu and Richard Socher.

           (I become an NLPer from here!)

    Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China

           Research Intern,   Summer 2018

           Mentors: Pengcheng Zou and Zhao Li.

    Service

  • Mentoring Interns at Salesforce: Zixian Ma (2024), Liangwei Yang (2023), Ziwei Fan (2022)
  • Program Committee/Reviewer: ACL Rolling Review 2021-pres, EMNLP 2021-Pres, NeurIPS 2023-Pres, EACL 2023, ACL 2021/2022, NAACL 2021, IEEE/ACM TASLP 2020-Pres, and others.
  • Session Chair: COLING 2020 (industry track: Dialogue).
  • Senior Program Committee: CIKM 2023-Pres.


  • This website is under construction