Austin Xu

picture of me in Florence, Italy

Research Scientist
Salesforce AI Research

Email: austin.xu[at]salesforce[dot]com

CV (Updated August 2023)
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About Me


I'm a Research Scientist at Salesforce AI Research. I earned my PhD at Georgia Tech, where I was fortunate to be advised by Mark Davenport and collaborate closely with Ashwin Pananjady. Prior to that, I earned by BSE at the University of Michigan. During graduate school, I spent time interning at Duolingo, where I worked with Will Monroe, and at Amazon, where I worked with Arjun Seshadri, Mariya Vasileva, and Achal Dave.

My current research broadly focuses on how to improve the reasoning ability of foundation models, in particular large language models. I'm also interested in the role humans play in the era of large models: when are human responses necessary, and when we can avoid collecting human feedback?

In my free time, I enjoy cooking (and eating), reading, running, and watching basketball (NBA and college).

Selected publications and preprints

* Denotes equal contribution
PhD Thesis: Learning with and without human feedback. Georgia Institute of Technology, 2024.
[local copy][defense slides]

Experience


Work Experience

Teaching Experience