Yang Chen  | 中文

Research Fellow
School of Computer Science
University of Auckland

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I am currently a research fellow with the School of Computer Science, University of Auckland. I obtained my PhD in computer science from University of Auckland. where I was supervised by Dr. Jiamou Liu and Prof. Bakhadyr Khoussainov. I received the First Class Honours degree in computer science from University of Auckland in 2018. Before coming to New Zealand, I received the B.S. in computer science from Beijing Institute of Technology in 2017. My research interests span a spectrum of (inverse) reinforcement learning, computational game theory and multi-agent systems. Lately, my research focus is on applying reinforcement learning in large-scale multi-agent games, natural language processing and automatic reasoning.

When I am not spending time on research and teaching, I can be found as a hiker and photography lover. The collections of pictures that I took in the hike-way can be found in my personal online gallery. I have hiked to many famous routes in many cities and towns across China and New Zealand.



June 2021 -- Present Research Fellow University of Auckland
September 2020 -- January 2021 Research Intern Alibaba DAMO Academy



Towards Many-agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning via Mean Field Games DAI 2023. Invited talk. Singapore. 02 Dec 2023. Slides
Promotional talk for AAMAS 2024 at the closing session of AAMAS 2023 AAMAS 2023. London. 02 Jun 2023. Slides
Mean Field Game as a Framework for Many-agent Inverse Reinforcement Learning ML and MFG seminar. Online. 06 Dec 2022. Slides



COMPSCI 761 Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence Semester 2, 2023, University of Auckland Video
COMPSCI 761 Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence Semester 2, 2022, University of Auckland Video
COMPSCI 220 Algorithms and Data Structures Semester 1, 2022, University of Auckland Video



Current Research




AAMAS 2022 Scholarship April 2022
Google Global PhD Fellowship Nomination (Austrilia & New Zealand) August 2020
Best Paper Award, BSCI 2019 July 2019
Summer scholarship funding from the Precision Driven Health research partnership July 2019
University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarship November 2018 - November 2021



Reviewer: AAMAS 2023, ICNLP 2022, BSCI 2022, Social Network Analysis and Mining (SNAM)
Conference Organising: Local Co-chair of AAMAS 2024



In cases that publisher links are non-free, please refer to the PDF files hosted on arXiv or other platforms. Talks, presentation slides, videos, codes and other extra materials are sometimes included. Awards are highlighted where available.

Game Theory, Multi-agent Systems & Reinforcement Learning

  • Density-based Correlated Equilibrium for Markov Games.
    Libo Zhang (equal contribution), Yang Chen (contact, equal contribution), Toru Takisaka, Bakh Khoussainov, Michael Witbrock, Jiamou Liu.
    The 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems.
    AAMAS 2023 | arXiv | Poster | Code
  • Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Mean Field Games.
    Yang Chen, Libo Zhang, Jiamou Liu, Michael Witbrock.
    The 22nd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems.
    AAMAS 2023 | arXiv | Poster | Slides
  • Interconnected Neural Linear Contextual Bandits with UCB Exploration.
    Yang Chen, Miao Xie, Jiamou Liu, Kaiqi Zhao.
    The 26th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining.
    PAKDD 2022
  • Individual-Level Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Mean Field Games.
    Yang Chen, Libo Zhang, Jiamou Liu, Shuyue Hu.
    The 21st International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems.
    AAMAS 2022 | arXiv
  • Social Capital Games as A Framework for Social Structural Pattern Emergence.
    Yang Chen, Jiamou Liu.
    2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining.
    ASONAM 2020
  • Social Structure Emergence: A Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning Framework for Relationship Building.
    Yang Chen, Jiamou Liu, He Zhao, Hongyi Su.
    The 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems.
    AAMAS 2020 | Slides | Talk
  • Can Reinforcement Learning Enhance Social Capital?
    He Zhao, Hongyi Su, Yang Chen, Jiamou Liu, Bo Yan, Hong Zheng.
    The International Workshop on Web Information Systems in the Era of AI. A WISE 2020 Workshop.
    WISE 2020
  • A Reinforcement Learning Approach to Gaining Social Capital with Partial Observation.
    He Zhao, Hongyi Su, Yang Chen (contact), Jiamou Liu, Hong Zheng, Bo Yan.
    The 16th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
    PRICAI 2019

Deep Learning & Application

  • Chain of Propagation Prompting for Node Classification.
    Yonghua Zhu, Zhenyun Deng, Yang Chen, Robert Amor, Michael Witbrock.
    ACM MultiMedia 2023.
    ACM MM 2023
  • MSDC: Non-intrusive Load Monitoring with a Dual-CNN Model.
    Jialing He, Jiamou Liu, Zijian Zhang, Yang Chen, Yiwei Liu, Bakh Khoussainov, Liehuang Zhu.
    Thirty-Seventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-23).
    AAAI 2023 | arXiv

Graph Theory

  • Becoming Gatekeepers Together with Allies: Collaborative Brokerage over Social Networks.
    Yang Chen, Jiamou Liu.
    2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining.
    ASONAM 2019 | Poster | Code
  • Distributed Community Detection over Blockchain Networks Based on Structural Entropy.
    Yang Chen, Jiamou Liu.
    The 2019 ACM International Symposium on Blockchain and Secure Critical Infrastructure (BSCI). An AsiaCCS Workshop.
    Best Paper Award | BSCI 2019 | PDF
  • Dynamic Relationship Building: Exploitation Versus Exploration on a Social Network.
    Bo Yan, Yang Chen, Jiamou Liu.
    The 18th International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering.
    WISE 2017 | Code

Reasoning in Natural Language Processing

  • Neuromodulation Gated Transformer.
    Kobe Knowles, Joshua Bensemann, Diana Benavides Prado, Vithya Yogarajan, Michael Wit- brock, Gillian Dobbie, Yang Chen.
    The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations. ICLR 2023 Tiny Papers.
    arXiv
  • Multi2Claim: Generating Scientific Claims from Multi-Choice Questions for Scientific Fact-Checking.
    Neset Tan, Trung Nguyen, Josh Bensemann, Alex Peng, Qiming Bao, Yang Chen, Mark Gahegan, Michael Witbrock.
    The 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
    EACL 2023
  • Prompt-based Conservation Learning for Multi-hop Question Answering.
    Zhenyun Deng, Yonghua Zhu, Yang Chen, Qianqian Qi, Michael Witbrock, Patricia Riddle.
    The 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics.
    COLING 2022 | arXiv
  • Interpretable AMR-Based Question Decomposition for Multi-hop Question Answering.
    Zhenyun Deng, Yonghua Zhu, Yang Chen, Michael Witbrock, Patricia Riddle.
    The 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
    IJCAI 2022
  • Eye Gaze and Self-attention: How Humans and Transformers Attend Words in Sentences.
    Joshua Bensemann, Alex Yuxuan Peng, Diana Benavides-Prado, Yang Chen, Nes ̧et Özkan Tan, Paul Michael Corballis, Patricia Riddle, and Michael Witbrock.
    Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) 2022. An ACL 2022 Workshop.
    PDF
  • An explainability analysis of a sentiment prediction task using a transformer-based attention filter.
    Neset Özkan Tan, Joshua Bensemann, Diana Benavides-Prado, Yang Chen, Mark Gahegan, Lia Lee, Alex Yuxuan Peng, Patricia Riddle, Michael Witbrock.
    The Ninth Annual Conference on Advances in Cognitive Systems
    ACS 2021

Datasets

  • Meerkat Behaviour Recognition Dataset.
    Mitchell Rogers, Gael Gendron, David Soriano Valdez, Mihailo Azhar, Yang Chen, Shahrokh Heidari, Caleb Perelini, Padriac O'leary, Kobe Knowles, Izak Tait, Simon Eyre, Michael Wit- brock, Patrice Delmas.
    3rd Workshop on CV4Animals: Computer Vision for Animal Behavior Tracking and Modeling (in conjunction with CVPR 2023).
Plain Academic