Note

PhD Application

I am glad to share my SOP for the PhD application. Honestly I learnt a lot from the PhD application process, and growing from a student into a junior researcher, by preparing application materials, looking for information of different research groups, and chatting with different senior researchers. This is where I recorded my PhD application experience (in Chinese).

Undergraduate Course Project

• [Modern NLP Project at EPFL] Finetune chatbot for education use via Direct Preference Optimization
  CS552 Modern NLP (Graduate-level) It is an interesting experience since it was my first time to implement something related to LLM. Also intriguingly, we discovered both chosen and reject reward decrease at the same time in section 5.2, which echos discussions on drawbacks of DPO.

• [OptML project at EPFL] Investigations into Sharpness-aware Minimization
  CS439 Optimization in Machine Learning Project (Graduate-level) We discovered that many theory literature on SAM assumes diminishing radius, therefore, in this project, we explored how radius, norm of the ball and the normalization affect generalization performance.

• [ML project at HKUST] Theory for Understanding Transformers: An Overview of current research
  COMP5212 Machine Learning Project (Graduate-level)
  A brief survey on recent Transformer theory