Robin Jia

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Email: robinjia at usc dot edu
Office: SAL 236

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California. I am interested broadly in natural language processing and machine learning, with a particular focus on building NLP systems that are robust to distribution shift at test time.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where I was advised by Percy Liang. After that, I spent one year as a visiting researcher at Facebook AI Research, working with Luke Zettlemoyer and Douwe Kiela.

If you are an undergraduate or master’s student at USC and are interested in doing research with me, please send me an email with the following:

  1. A description of why you’re interested in doing research.
  2. A summary of any experience you think may be relevant, including but not limited to coursework, previous projects, volunteer work, etc.
  3. A copy of your undergraduate and graduate (if applicable) transcripts.
  4. (Optional) Your CV.

Unfortunately, I do not have the bandwidth to advise undergraduate or master’s students from other universities at this time.

Ph.D. Students

Publications

Benchmarking Long-tail Generalization with Likelihood Splits.
Ameya Godbole and Robin Jia.
Findings of EACL, 2023.

Generalization Differences between End-to-End and Neuro-Symbolic Vision-Language Reasoning Systems.
Wang Zhu, Jesse Thomason, and Robin Jia.
Findings of EMNLP, 2022.

Knowledge base question answering by case-based reasoning over subgraphs.
Rajarshi Das, Ameya Godbole, Ankita Naik, Elliot Tower, Manzil Zaheer, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Robin Jia, and Andrew McCallum.
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2022.

On the Robustness of Reading Comprehension Models to Entity Renaming.
Jun Yan, Yang Xiao, Sagnik Mukherjee, Bill Yuchen Lin, Robin Jia, and Xiang Ren.
North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2022.
(acl anthology) (bib)

Models in the Loop: Aiding Crowdworkers with Generative Annotation Assistants.
Max Bartolo, Tristan Thrush, Sebastian Riedel, Pontus Stenetorp, Robin Jia, and Douwe Kiela.
North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2022.
(acl anthology) (bib)

Question Answering Infused Pre-training of General-Purpose Contextualized Representations.
Robin Jia, Mike Lewis, and Luke Zettlemoyer.
Findings of ACL, 2022.
(github) (acl anthology) (bib)

Analyzing Dynamic Adversarial Training Data in the Limit.
Eric Wallace, Adina Williams, Robin Jia, and Douwe Kiela.
Findings of ACL, 2022.
(github) (acl anthology) (bib)

On Continual Model Refinement in Out-of-Distribution Data Streams.
Bill Yuchen Lin, Sida Wang, Xi Victoria Lin, Robin Jia, Lin Xiao, Xiang Ren, and Scott Yih.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2022.
(acl anthology) (bib)

Dynaboard: An Evaluation-As-A-Service Platform for Holistic Next-Generation Benchmarking.
Zhiyi Ma*, Kawin Ethayarajh*, Tristan Thrush*, Somya Jain, Ledell Wu, Robin Jia, Christopher Potts, Adina Williams, and Douwe Kiela.
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021.
(website) (blog post)

Masked Language Modeling and the Distributional Hypothesis: Order Word Matters Pre-training for Little.
Koustuv Sinha, Robin Jia, Dieuwke Hupkes, Joelle Pineau, Adina Williams, and Douwe Kiela.
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021.
(github) (acl anthology) (bib)

Improving Question Answering Model Robustness with Synthetic Adversarial Data Generation.
Max Bartolo, Tristan Thrush, Robin Jia, Sebastian Riedel, Pontus Stenetorp, and Douwe Kiela.
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021.
(model) (website) (acl anthology) (bib)

To What Extent do Human Explanations of Model Behavior Align with Actual Model Behavior?
Grusha Prasad, Yixin Nie, Mohit Bansal, Robin Jia, Douwe Kiela, and Adina Williams.
BlackBoxNLP Workshop, 2021.
(acl anthology) (bib)

The statistical advantage of automatic NLG metrics at the system level.
Johnny Tian-Zheng Wei and Robin Jia.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021.
(github) (acl anthology) (bib)

Evaluation Examples Are Not Equally Informative: How Should That Change NLP Leaderboards?
Pedro Rodriguez, Joe Barrow, Alexander Hoyle, John P. Lalor, Robin Jia, and Jordan Boyd-Graber.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2021.
(website) (acl anthology) (bib)

Human Evaluation of Spoken vs. Visual Explanations for Open-Domain QA.
Ana Valeria Gonzalez, Gagan Bansal, Angela Fan, Robin Jia, Yashar Mehdad, and Srinivasan Iyer.
Findings of ACL, 2021.
(acl anthology) (bib)

Swords: A Benchmark for Lexical Substitution with Improved Data Coverage and Quality.
Mina Lee*, Chris Donahue*, Robin Jia, Alexander Iyabor, and Percy Liang.
North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2021.
(github) (codalab) (acl anthology) (bib)

Dynabench: Rethinking Benchmarking in NLP.
Douwe Kiela, Max Bartolo, Yixin Nie, Divyansh Kaushik, Atticus Geiger, Zhengxuan Wu, Bertie Vidgen, Grusha Prasad, Amanpreet Singh, Pratik Ringshia, Zhiyi Ma, Tristan Thrush, Sebastian Riedel, Zeerak Waseem, Pontus Stenetorp, Robin Jia, Mohit Bansal, Christopher Potts, and Adina Williams.
North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2021.
(website) (acl anthology) (bib)

N-ary relation prediction over text spans.
Hoifung Poon, Cliff Wong, and Robin Jia.
US Patent, 2021.

On the Importance of Adaptive Data Collection for Extremely Imbalanced Pairwise Tasks.
Stephen Mussmann*, Robin Jia*, and Percy Liang.
Findings of EMNLP, 2020.
(codalab) (github) (acl anthology) (bib)

With Little Power Comes Great Responsibility.
Dallas Card, Peter Henderson, Urvashi Khandelwal, Robin Jia, Kyle Mahowald, and Dan Jurafsky.
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2020.
(github) (acl anthology) (bib)

Building Robust Natural Language Processing Systems.
Robin Jia.
Ph.D. Dissertation, 2020.

Selective Question Answering under Domain Shift.
Amita Kamath, Robin Jia, and Percy Liang.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2020.
(codalab) (acl anthology) (bib)

Robust Encodings: A Framework for Combating Adversarial Typos.
Erik Jones, Robin Jia*, Aditi Raghunathan*, and Percy Liang.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2020.
(codalab) (github) (acl anthology) (bib)

Certified Robustness to Adversarial Word Substitutions.
Robin Jia, Aditi Raghunathan, Kerem Göksel, Percy Liang.
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2019.
(codalab) (github) (acl anthology) (bib)

MRQA 2019 Shared Task: Evaluating Generalization in Reading Comprehension.
Adam Fisch, Alon Talmor, Robin Jia, Minjoon Seo, Eunsol Choi, and Danqi Chen.
Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering (MRQA), 2019.
(github) (acl anthology) (bib)

Document-Level N-ary Relation Extraction with Multiscale Representation Learning.
Robin Jia, Cliff Wong, and Hoifung Poon.
North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2019.
(code and data) (acl anthology) (bib)

Know What You Don't Know: Unanswerable Questions for SQuAD.
Pranav Rajpurkar*, Robin Jia*, and Percy Liang.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2018.
Best Short Paper Award.
(website) (codalab) (pptx slides) (pdf slides) (acl anthology) (bib)

Delete, Retrieve, Generate: A Simple Approach to Sentiment and Style Transfer.
Juncen Li, Robin Jia, He He, and Percy Liang.
North American Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), 2018.
(codalab) (pptx slides) (pdf slides) (acl anthology) (bib)

Adversarial Examples for Evaluating Reading Comprehension Systems.
Robin Jia and Percy Liang.
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2017.
Outstanding Paper Award.
(codalab) (pptx slides) (pdf slides) (acl anthology) (bib)

Learning Concepts through Conversations in Spoken Dialogue Systems.
Robin Jia, Larry Heck, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, and Georgi Nikolov.
International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2017.
(data) (bib)

Data Recombination for Neural Semantic Parsing.
Robin Jia and Percy Liang.
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2016.
(codalab) (pptx slides) (pdf slides) (acl anthology) (bib)

"Reverse Genomics" Predicts Function of Human Conserved Noncoding Elements.
Amir Marcovitz, Robin Jia, and Gill Bejerano.
Molecular Biology and Evolution (MBE), 2016.

Mx1 and Mx2 Key Antiviral Proteins are Surprisingly Lost in Toothed Whales.
Benjamin A. Braun, Amir Marcovitz, J. Gray Camp, Robin Jia, and Gill Bejerano.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 2015.

* denotes equal contribution

Preprints

CoNAL: Anticipating Outliers with Large Language Models.
Albert Xu, Xiang Ren, and Robin Jia.
arXiv, 2022.
SoCalNLP Symposium 2022 Best Paper Award.

Are Sample-Efficient NLP Models More Robust?
Nelson F. Liu, Ananya Kumar, Percy Liang, and Robin Jia.
arXiv, 2022.

Can Small and Synthetic Benchmarks Drive Modeling Innovation? A Retrospective Study of Question Answering Modeling Approaches.
Nelson F. Liu, Tony Lee, Robin Jia, and Percy Liang.
arXiv, 2021.

Teaching

USC

Stanford

Professional Service

Other Work

Industry Internships

Undergraduate Research

Music

I have had the great pleasure of studying piano performance with Angela Wright and Laura Dahl. At various points, I have also studied solo piano with George Barth, duo piano with Kumaran Arul, and chamber music with Stephen Harrison.

Here are some of my recordings:

Piano duo concert, June 2017

Lisa Wang and I gave a piano duo concert on June 4, 2017.

* Probably not actually by Haydn

Piano Quintet Recital, May 2016

Ricky Wedeen, Brad Girardeau, Lee Fan, Andrew Guo, and I gave a concert on May 18, 2016, at which we performed the Schumann Piano Quintet, Op. 44 (mp3).

Senior Recital, April 2014

I gave my undergraduate senior recital on April 12, 2014. Here are the live audio recordings.

Other