I’m a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC), where I was advised by Prof. Muhao Chen and Prof. Fred Morstatter.

My research focuses on post-training and inference-time methods for LLM robustness, alignment, and collaboration.

Prior to my Ph.D., I got my Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and my Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Science from the University of Toronto (UofT).

Selected Publications

Full list of publications on Google Scholar

Be My Eyes: Extending Large Language Models to New Modalities Through Multi-Agent Collaboration
James Y. Huang, Sheng Zhang, Qianchu Liu, Guanghui Qin, Tinghui Zhu, Tristan Naumann, Muhao Chen, Hoifung Poon
Preprint

DeAL: Decoding-time Alignment for Large Language Models
James Y. Huang, Sailik Sengupta, Daniele Bonadiman, Yi-an Lai, Arshit Gupta, Nikolaos Pappas, Saab Mansour, Katrin Kirchoff, Dan Roth
ACL 2025

mDPO: Conditional Preference Optimization for Multimodal Large Language Models
Fei Wang, Wenxuan Zhou, James Y. Huang, Nan Xu, Sheng Zhang, Hoifung Poon, Muhao Chen
EMNLP 2024

Bridging Continuous and Discrete Spaces: Interpretable Sentence Representation Learning via Compositional Operations
James Y. Huang, Wenlin Yao, Kaiqiang Song, Hongming Zhang, Muhao Chen, Dong Yu
EMNLP 2023 🏆Outstanding Paper Award

Unified Semantic Typing with Meaningful Label Inference
James Y. Huang, Bangzheng Li, Jiashu Xu, Muhao Chen
NAACL 2022

Disentangling Semantics and Syntax in Sentence Embeddings with Pre-trained Language Models
James Y. Huang, Kuan-Hao Huang, Kai-Wei Chang
NAACL 2021