Muru Zhang

Hi! I’m a first-year PhD student at the University of Southern California, advised by Prof. Swabha Swayamdipta and Prof. Robin Jia. I’m broadly interested in understanding language model internal to:

• Elicit desired behavior through activation engineering
• Inform model compression techniques by identifying important and redundant components
• Investigate when and why a model might fail

I’m currently a student researcher at Google Deepmind working on language model architectures. In the past, I have interned at TogetherAI and the CodeWhisperer team at Amazon on various language model effciency and architecture design related projects.

I completed both my Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree at University of Washington and I was very fortunate to be mentored by Prof. Noah A. Smith, Ofir Press, and Aaron Walsman. I’m grateful for all my amazing collaborators and mentors at UW for their help and guidance on research.

I love teaching and had plenty of joys as a teaching assistant at UW for 9-quarters, it was my pleasure to be able to teach computer science to the excellent audience at the Allen school :)

You can download my CV here.