I am an Associate Professor at the Computer Science Department of University of California, Los Angeles, and a Visiting Academics at the Amazon AGI org. I direct the PLUSLAB (Peng's Language Understanding and Synthesis Lab) at UCLA, with the vision to develop robust Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to lower communication barriers and make AI agents true companions for humans.
Central to my vision is the advancement of AI creativity, which I believe is crucial for fostering more inspiring and productive human-AI interactions. By equipping AI systems with creative capabilities, we enable them to engage in more engaging and contextually rich ways, and offer innovative solutions to complex problems.
To realize this research vision, My group's research encompasses controllable (creative) language generation, multi-modal foundation models, automatic evaluation of foundation models, and low-resource, multilingual natural language understanding (NLU). By integrating these diverse areas, we aim to create AI systems that not only understand and generate language with precision but also exhibit the creativity needed to engage in meaningful, contextually rich dialogues. Our ultimate goal is to empower AI to assist, collaborate, and inspire, thereby enhancing the quality of human life through innovative and accessible technological solutions.