Yi Chen

Ph.D. Student in Machine Learning

Madison, US.

About

I am a fourth year PhD student in the ECE department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, advised by Professor Ramya Korlakai Vinayak. I am interested in crowdsourcing, preference learning, and the application of machine learning algorithms. I received my B.A. in Computer Sciences and Mathematics with Honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison as well.

Publications

Chen, Y. and Vinayak, R. K. “Query Design for Crowdsourced Clustering: Effect of Cognitive Overload and Contextual Bias.”

Workshop on Models of Human Feedback for AI Alignment (ICML 2024)

Tatli, G., Chen, Y., and Vinayak, R. K. “Learning Populations of Preferences via Pairwise Comparison Queries”

MFPL Workshop at the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023)

Chen, Y., Vinayak, R. K., and Hassibi, B. “Crowdsourced Clustering via Active Querying: Practical Algorithm with Theoretical Guarantees.”

AI & HCI Workshop at the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2023)

Tatli, G., Chen, Y., and Vinayak, R. K. “Learning Preference Distributions From Pairwise Comparisons."

9th International Workshop on Computational Social Choice (COMSOC 2023)

Tatli, G., Chen, Y., Mason, B., Nowak, R. D., Vinayak, R. K. “Metric Learning in an RKHS.”

The 41st Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI 2025)

Vishwakarma, H.*, Chen, Y.*, Namburi, S.S.S., Tay, S.J., Vinayak, R. K., Sala, F. “Rethinking Confidence and Thresholds in Pseudolabeling-based SSL.”

Forty-second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025)

Chen, Y. and Vinayak, R. K. “Query Design for Crowdsourced Clustering: Effect of Cognitive Overload and Contextual Bias.”

The Web Conference 2025 (TheWebConf 2025) [Oral]

Chen, D., Chen, Y., Rege, A. and Vinayak, R. K. “PAL: Pluralistic Alignment Framework for Learning from Heterogeneous Preferences.”

The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)

Vishwakarma, H., Chen, Y., Tay, S. J., Namburi, S. S. S., Sala, F., and Vinayak, R. K. “Pearls from Pebbles: Improved Confidence Functions for Auto-labeling.”

The Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)

Tatli, G., Chen, Y., and Vinayak, R. K. “Learning Populations of Preferences via Pairwise Comparison Queries.”

Proceedings of The 26th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS 2024)

Chen, Y., Vinayak, R. K., and Hassibi, B. “Crowdsourced Clustering via Active Querying: Practical Algorithm with Theoretical Guarantees.”

The Eleventh AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing (HCOMP 2023)

Chen, Y., Yin, C. H., Chikodikar, S. M., and Vinayak, R. K. “On the Scoring Functions for RAG-based Conformal Factuality.”

ICML 2025 Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models (ICML 2025)

Education

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America
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Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America
→
M.S. Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America
→
B.A. Computer Sciences (Honors in Major)

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America
→
B.A. Mathematics

Awards

HCOMP/CI 2023 Travel Award

HCOMP/CI

UW-Madison Conference Presentation Award

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Skills

Programming Languages

Python, C/C++, Java, JavaScript, Rust, CUDA, SQL.

ML/AI Frameworks

PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, Hugging Face Transformers, scikit-learn.

Tools & Platforms

AWS (Lambda, S3, EC2), Docker, Git, MongoDB, React, Node.js.

Specializations

Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RLHF), Crowdsourcing, Foundation Model Alignment, Trustworthy AI, Human-in-the-Loop ML, Distributed Systems, Production ML Pipelines.