Wenhu Chen


Assistant Professor at Computer Science at University of Waterloo

Vector Institute, CIFAR AI Chair

Research Scientist at Google Brain (20% Part-time)

Email: wenhuchen [at] uwaterloo [dot] ca

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Research Interest

My research interest covers natural language processing, deep learning, knowledge representation and reasoning. Specifically, I aim at developing models that can ground and reason over external world knowledge to understand human language and communicate with humans. I am also interested in multi-modal problems like visual question answering and captioning.

I publish and serve as program committee in ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, ICLR, NeurIPS, etc. I received the WACV best-student paper honorable mention in 2021. I also received outstanding dissertation award from UCSB in June 2021. I serve as Senior Program Committee for AAAI and Area Chair for EMNLP and AACL.

I'm always looking for talented and self-motivated students. You can drop me an email to demonstrate your interest, but the final decision won't be made until I see all the applications in the system after the official deadline.

Teaching

Preprints

  • DePlot: One-shot visual language reasoning by plot-to-table translation
    Fangyu Liu, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Francesco Piccinno, Syrine Krichene, Chenxi Pang, Kenton Lee, Mandar Joshi, Wenhu Chen, Nigel Collier, Yasemin Altun
    Manuscript [pdf]
  • Synthesizing Coherent Story with Auto-Regressive Latent Diffusion Models
    Xichen Pan, Pengda Qin, Yuhong Li, Hui Xue, Wenhu Chen
    Manuscript [pdf][code]
  • Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks
    Wenhu Chen*, Xueguang Ma*, Xinyi Wang, William W. Cohen
    Manuscript [pdf][code][demo]

Publications

    2023

  • Large Language Models are few(1)-shot Table Reasoners
    Wenhu Chen
    Findings of EACL 2023, Dubrovnik, Croatia [pdf][code]
  • Augmenting Pre-trained Language Models with QA-Memory for Open-Domain Question Answering
    Wenhu Chen, Pat Verga, Michiel de Jong, John Wieting, William Cohen
    EACL 2023, Dubrovnik, Croatia [pdf]
  • Re-Imagen: Retrieval-Augmented Text-to-Image Generator
    Wenhu Chen,Hexiang Hu, Chitwan Saharia, William W. Cohen
    ICLR 2023, Kigali Rwanda [pdf]

    • 2022

  • QA Is the New KR: Question-Answer Pairs as Knowledge Bases
    William W. Cohen, Wenhu Chen, Michiel De Jong, Nitish Gupta, Alessandro Presta, Pat Verga, John Wieting (All Equal Contribution)
    AAAI 2023, Senior Member Track [pdf]
  • MuRAG: Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generator for Open Question Answering over Images and Text
    Wenhu Chen, Hexiang Hu, Xi Chen, Pat Verga, William W. Cohen
    EMNLP 2022, Abu Dhabi [pdf]
  • Controllable Dialogue Simulation with In-context Learning
    Zekun Li, Wenhu Chen, Shiyang Li, Hong Wang, Jing Qian and Xifeng Yan
    Findings of EMNLP 2022, Abu Dhabi [pdf]
  • HybriDialogue: An Information-Seeking Dialogue Dataset Grounded on Tabular and Textual Data
    Kai Nakamura, Sharon Levy, Yi-Lin Tuan, Wenhu Chen, William Yang Wang
    Findings of ACL 2022, Virtual [pdf][code]

    • 2021

  • A Dataset for Answering Time-Sensitive Questions
    Wenhu Chen, Xinyi Wang, William Yang Wang
    Proceedings of NeurIPS 2021, Virtual [pdf][code]
  • Local Explanation of Dialogue Response Generation
    Yi-Lin Tuan, Connor Pryor, Wenhu Chen, Lise Getoor, William Yang Wang
    Proceedings of NeurIPS 2021, Virtual [pdf][code]
  • Counterfactual Maximum Likelihood Estimation for Training Deep Networks
    Xinyi Wang, Wenhu Chen, Michael Saxon, William Yang Wang
    Proceedings of NeurIPS 2021, Virtual [pdf][code]
  • FinQA: A Dataset of Numerical Reasoning over Financial Data
    Zhiyu Chen, Wenhu Chen, Charese Smiley, Sameena Shah, Iana Borova, Dylan Langdon, \\
    Reema Moussa, Matt Beane, Ting-Hao Huang, Bryan R. Routledge, William Yang Wang
    Proceedings of EMNLP 2021, Virtual [pdf][code]
  • Task-adaptive Pre-training and Self-training are Complementary for Natural Language Understanding
    Shiyang Li, Semih Yavuz, Wenhu Chen and Xifeng Yan
    Findings of EMNLP 2021, Virtual [pdf]
  • Zero-shot Fact Verification by Claim Generation
    Liangming Pan, Wenhu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Min-Yen Kan and William Wang
    Proceedings of ACL 2021, Virtual [pdf][code]
  • A Systematic Investigation of KB-Text Embedding Alignment at Scale
    Vardaan Pahuja, Yu Gu, Wenhu Chen, Mehdi Bahrami, Lei Liu, Wei-Peng Chen and Yu Su
    Proceedings of ACL 2021, Virtual [pdf][code]
  • Unsupervised Multi-hop Question Answering by Question Generation
    Liangming Pan, Wenhu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Min-Yen Kan, William Wang
    Proceedings of NAACL 2021, Mexico City, Mexico [pdf][code]
  • Open Question Answering over Tables and Text
    Wenhu Chen, Ming-wei Chang, Eva Schlinger, William Wang, William Cohen
    Proceedings of ICLR 2021, Virtual [pdf][data and code] [codalab][slides][talk-slides]
  • Meta Module Network for Compositional Visual Reasoning
    Wenhu Chen, Zhe Gan, Linjie Li, Yu Cheng, William Wang, Jingjing Liu
    Proceedings of WACV 2021, Hawaii, USA [pdf][code]
    (Best Student Paper Honorable Mention)

    • 2020

  • KGPT: Knowledge-Grounded Pre-Training for Data-to-Text Generation
    Wenhu Chen, Yu Su, Xifeng Yan, William Wang
    Proceedings of EMNLP 2020, Punta Cana, Dominican [pdf][data and code][slides]
  • HybridQA: A Dataset of Multi-Hop Question Answering over Tabular and Textual Data
    Wenhu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Zhiyu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Hong Wang, William Wang
    Findings of EMNLP 2020 [pdf][data and code][codalab][website]
  • Logic2Text: High-Fidelity Natural Language Generation from Logical Forms
    Zhiyu Chen, Wenhu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Xiyou Zhou, Yunkai Zhang, Sairam Sundaresan, William Wang
    Findings of EMNLP 2020 [pdf][data and code]
  • Logical Natural Language Generation from Open-Domain Tables
    Wenhu Chen, Jianshu Chen, Yu Su, Zhiyu Chen and William Wang
    Proceedings of ACL 2020, Seattle, USA [pdf][data and code][codalab][slides]
  • Few-shot NLG with Pre-trained Language Model
    Zhiyu Chen, Harini Eavani, Wenhu Chen, Yinyin Liu and William Wang
    Proceedings of ACL 2020, Seattle, USA [pdf][data and code]
  • VIOLIN: A Large-Scale Dataset for Video-and-Language Inference
    Jingzhou Liu, Wenhu Chen, Yu Cheng, Zhe Gan, Licheng Yu, Yiming Yang, Jingjing Liu
    Proceedings of CVPR 2020, Seattle, USA [pdf][data and code]
  • TabFact: A Large-scale Dataset for Table-based Fact Verification
    Wenhu Chen, Hongmin Wang, Jianshu Chen, Yunkai Zhang, Hong Wang, Shiyang Li, Xiyou Zhou and William Wang
    Proceedings of ICLR 2020, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia [pdf][website][data and code][codalab][slides]
  • Generative Adversarial Zero-Shot Relational Learning for Knowledge Graphs
    Pengda Qin, Xin Wang, Wenhu Chen, Chunyun Zhang, Weiran Xu, William Wang
    Proceedings of AAAI 2020, New York, US (Oral) [pdf][blog][code]

    • 2019

  • Enhancing the Locality and Breaking the Memory Bottleneck of Transformer on Time Series Forecasting
    Shiyang Li, Xiaoyong Jin, Yao Xuan, Xiyou Zhou, Wenhu Chen, Yu-Xiang Wang, Xifeng Yan
    Proceedings of NeurIPS 2019, Vancouver, Canada [pdf]
  • Interpreting and Improving Deep Neural SLU Models via Vocabulary Importance
    Yilin Shen, Wenhu Chen, Hongxia Jin
    Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2019, Graz, Austria (Oral) [pdf]
  • Semantically Conditioned Dialog Response Generation via Hierarchical Disentangled Self-Attention
    Wenhu Chen, Jianshu Chen, Pengda Qin, Xifeng Yan and William Wang
    Proceedings of ACL 2019, Florence, Italy [pdf][code]
  • Global Textual Relation Embedding for Relational Understanding
    Zhiyu Chen, Hanwen Zha, Honglei Liu, Wenhu Chen, Xifeng Yan and Yu Su
    Proceedings of ACL 2019, Florence, Italy [pdf][code]
  • Mining Algorithm Roadmap in Scientific Publications
    Hanwen Zha, Wenhu Chen, Keqian Li and Xifeng Yan
    Proceedings of KDD 2019, Alaska, USA (Oral) [pdf][blog][video][code]
  • How Large A Vocabulary Does Text Classification Need? A Variational Approach on Vocabulary Selection
    Wenhu Chen, Yu Su, Yilin Shen, Zhiyu Chen, Xifeng Yan and William Wang
    Proceedings of NAACL 2019, Minneapolis, USA (Oral) [pdf][code][slides]

    • 2018

  • XL-NBT: A cross-lingual Neural Belief Tracking Framework
    Wenhu Chen, Jianshu Chen, Yu Su, Xin Wang, Dong Yu, Xifeng Yan and William Wang.
    Proceedings of EMNLP 2018, Brussels, Belgium [pdf][code][blog]
  • Triangular Architecture for Rare Language Translation
    Shuo Ren, Wenhu Chen, Shujie Liu, Mu Li, Ming Zhou and Shuai Ma.
    Proceedings of ACL 2018, Melbourne, Australia (Oral) [pdf][slides][blog]
  • No Metrics Are Perfect: Adversarial Reward Learning for Visual Storytelling
    Wenhu Chen*, Xin Wang*, Yuan-Fang Wang and William Wang (*Equal)
    Proceedings of ACL 2018, Melbourne, Australia (Oral) [pdf][code][blog][slides]
  • Variational Knowledge Graph Reasoning
    Wenhu Chen, Wenhan Xiong, Xifeng Yan, William Wang.
    Proceedings of NAACL 2018, New Orleans, CA (Oral) [pdf][slides][data][blog][video]
  • Generative Bridging Network in Neural Sequence Prediction
    Wenhu Chen, Guanlin Li, Shuo Ren, Shujie Liu, Zhirui Zhang, Mu Li, Ming Zhou.
    Proceedings of NAACL 2018, New Orleans, CA [pdf][poster]
  • Video Captioning via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
    Xin Wang, Wenhu Chen, Jiawei Wu, Yuan-fang Wang, William Wang.
    Proceedings of CVPR 2018, Salt Lake City, UTAH [pdf][blog]

    • Before 2018

  • Guided alignment training for topic-aware neural machine translation
    Wenhu Chen, Evgeny Matusov, Shahram Khadivi, JT Peter.
    Proceedings of AMTA 2016, Austin, TX (Oral) [pdf][openNMT]
  • Facial Emotion Recognition Using PHOG and a Hierarchical Expression Model
    Zhao Zhong, Gang Shen, Wenhu Chen.
    Proceedings of INCos 2013, XI`AN, CHINA [pdf]

Thesis

  • Accessing Diverse Web Knowledge with Natural Language Interface
    Wenhu Chen
    PhD dissertation at University of California, Santa Barbara [pdf]

Students

Awards

  • 2022: Canada CIFAR AI Chair
  • 2021: UCSB CS Outstanding Dissertation Award
  • 2021: WACV Best Student Paper Honorable Mention
  • 2018: Tencent AI Gift Award
  • 2016: IDEA Research Grant

Workshops and Tutorials

Services

  • Program Committee: NAACL, ACL, EMNLP, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR
  • Session Chair: NAACL 2021, EMNLP 2020
  • Area Chair: AACL 2022, EMNLP 2022, EACL 2023
  • Senior Program Committee: AAAI 2022

Talks

  • Building Retrieval-Grounded Text-to-Image Generation [pdf]
    - Colloquium at Fudan NLP Lab, Dec 2022
    - Colloquium at MLNLP, Oct 2022
  • Building Semi-parameteric Language Models to integrate World Knowledge [pdf]
    - Colloquium at UC Santa Cruz, April 2022
    - Colloquium at MLNLP, March 2022
    - Colloquium at Vector Institute (Endless Summer School), March 2022
  • Accessing Diverse Web Knowledge with Natural Language Interface [slides]
    - PhD Defense, June 2021
  • Knowledge-Grounded Natural Language Processing [slides][video]
    - Invited Talk at University of Hong Kong, March 2021
    - Invited Talk at National University of Singapore, March 2021
    - Invited Talk at Texas A&M University, March 2021
    - Invited Talk at University of Waterloo, March 2021
    - Invited Talk at Washington University in St. Luis, March 2021
    - Invited Talk at Google Research, Feb 2021
    - Invited Talk at Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Feb 2021
    - Invited Talk at Vanderbilt University, Feb 2021
    - Invited Talk at University of Sydney, Jan 2021
    - Invited Talk at Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, Jan 2021
    - Invited Talk at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Dec 2020
  • Natural Language Learning with Formal Semantics [pdf]
    - PhD Qualification Talk in Oct, 2019
  • Fact Verification with Semi-Structured Knowledge [slides]
    - FEVER Workshop Talk in Nov, 2019
  • Generating Structured Form with Sequence-to-Sequence Network [slides]
    - Reading Group of UCSB NLP Group in Nov, 2019