Chongyang Gao

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Northwestern University, advised by Prof. V.S. Subrahmanian. I received my M.S. from Dartmouth College, advised by Prof. Soroush Vosoughi, and my B.E. from Tianjin University. I was also a visiting student at Nanyang Technological University with Prof. Jianfei Cai. My research interests include large language models, agents, world models, computer vision, natural language processing, and multimodal learning.

Industry Experience

• Student Researcher, Google DeepMindJul. 2025 – Dec. 2025
• Research Scientist Intern, Google XJun. 2023 – Feb. 2024
• Research Scientist Intern, Adobe ResearchMar. 2023 – Jun. 2023

Selected Publications

* equal contribution

• FM-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Horizon Management with Competing Agents Tianyou Wang*, Chongyang Gao*, Kezhen Chen, Dong Chen, Yinghao He, Donghan Li, Wangcheng Xu, Hongjiu Zhang, Chi Li Preprint
• Classroom Final Exam: An Instructor-Tested Reasoning Benchmark Chongyang Gao, Diji Yang, Shuyan Zhou, Xichen Yan, Luchuan Song, Shuo Li, Kezhen Chen Preprint
• Context and Transcripts Improve Detection of Deepfake Audios of Public Figures Chongyang Gao, Marco Postiglione, Julian Baldwin, Natalia Denisenko, Isabel Gortner, Luke Fosdick, Chiara Pulice, Sarit Kraus, V.S. Subrahmanian Preprint
• SafePro: Generation of Safe and Functional Proteins via Cross-Task Conflict-Aware Alignment Chongyang Gao, Marco Postiglione, V.S. Subrahmanian NeurIPS 2026
• Perturbed Public Voices (P2V): A Dataset for Robust Audio Deepfake Detection Chongyang Gao, Marco Postiglione, Isabel Gortner, Sarit Kraus, V.S. Subrahmanian KDD 2026
• On Large Language Model Continual Unlearning Chongyang Gao*, Lixu Wang*, Kaize Ding, Chenkai Weng, Xiao Wang, Qi Zhu ICLR 2025
• MoLA: MoE LoRA with Layer-wise Expert Allocation Chongyang Gao, Kezhen Chen, Jinmeng Rao, Ruibo Liu, Baochen Sun, Yawen Zhang, Daiyi Peng, Xiaoyuan Guo, V.S. Subrahmanian NAACL 2025 (Findings)
• Assessing and Mitigating Medical Knowledge Drift and Conflicts in Large Language Models Weiyi Wu, Xinwen Xu, Chongyang Gao, Xingjian Diao, Siting Li, Lucas A. Salas, Jiang Gu EMNLP 2025 (Findings)
• GEM: Generating Engaging Multimodal Content Chongyang Gao, Yiren Jian, Natalia Denisenko, Soroush Vosoughi, V.S. Subrahmanian IJCAI 2024
• FakeDB: Generating Fake Synthetic Databases Chongyang Gao, Sushil Jajodia, Andrea Pugliese, V.S. Subrahmanian IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
• Bootstrapping Vision-Language Learning with Decoupled Language Pre-training Yiren Jian, Chongyang Gao, Soroush Vosoughi NeurIPS 2023Spotlight
• Non-Linguistic Supervision for Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings Yiren Jian*, Chongyang Gao*, Soroush Vosoughi NeurIPS 2022
• Embedding Hallucination for Few-Shot Language Fine-tuning Yiren Jian*, Chongyang Gao*, Soroush Vosoughi NAACL 2022
• Contrastive Learning for Prompt-Based Few-Shot Language Learners Yiren Jian, Chongyang Gao, Soroush Vosoughi NAACL 2022
• Non-Parallel Text Style Transfer with Self-Parallel Supervision Ruibo Liu, Chongyang Gao, Chenyan Jia, Guangxuan Xu, Soroush Vosoughi ICLR 2022
• Knowledge Infused Decoding Ruibo Liu, Guoqing Zheng, Shashank Gupta, Radhika Gaonkar, Chongyang Gao, Soroush Vosoughi, Milad Shokouhi, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah ICLR 2022
• MetaPix: Domain Transfer for Semantic Segmentation by Meta Pixel Weighting Yiren Jian*, Chongyang Gao* Image and Vision Computing 2021
• Auto-Parsing Network for Image Captioning and Visual Question Answering Xu Yang*, Chongyang Gao*, Hanwang Zhang, Jianfei Cai ICCV 2021
• Embedding Heterogeneous Networks into Hyperbolic Space Without Meta-path Lili Wang, Chongyang Gao, Chenghan Huang, Ruibo Liu, Weicheng Ma, Soroush Vosoughi AAAI 2021
• Hierarchical Scene Graph Encoder-Decoder for Image Paragraph Captioning Xu Yang*, Chongyang Gao*, Hanwang Zhang, Jianfei Cai ACM MM 2020
• An Empirical Survey of Unsupervised Text Representation Methods on Twitter Data Lili Wang, Chongyang Gao, Jason Wei, Weicheng Ma, Ruibo Liu, Soroush Vosoughi W-NUT 2020
• Sequence in Sequence for Video Captioning Huiyun Wang, Chongyang Gao, Yahong Han Pattern Recognition Letters 2020

Mentoring

* equal contribution  ·  † corresponding author

• MIRA: A Bilingual Benchmark for Medical Information Response Audit Mengyu Xu*, Qiaoxin Yang*, Qianqian Wang, Xiwei Dai, Weiyi Wu, Chongyang Gao† EMNLP 2026 (Main)
• Beyond the Expression Barrier: Negotiating Support Needs with Stage-Aware Supportive AI in CBT-Inspired Conversations Mengyu Xu, Jiale Liu, Qiaoxin Yang, Kairui Sun, Runze Li, Chongyang Gao† CSCW 2026 Companion (Poster)
• Suppressing Pressure, Amplifying Evidence: Self-Guided Attention Steering to Mitigate Sycophancy and Stubbornness Yinghao He*, Mengyu Xu*, Haixiang Sun, Donghan Li, Yibo Wang, Lixu Wang, Kezhen Chen, Chi Li, Chunwei Liu, Bharat Bhargava, Chongyang Gao† Preprint
• Equitable System-Prompt Selection via Constrained Mixed-Strategy GroupDRO Mengyu Xu, Qiaoxin Yang, Zhihan Liu, Ruiyao Xu, Zachary Liu, Kezhen Chen, Chongyang Gao† Preprint
• Rethinking LLM-Judged Helpfulness as a Pedagogy Signal: A Pre-Registered Audit Across Tutor Models Shuyi Fan*, Boyuan Deng*, Mengyu Xu*, Jiale Liu, Hongyang Zhang, Qiaoxin Yang, Chongyang Gao† Preprint

Services

Area Chair for:

• ACL ARR

Reviewer / PC member for:

• ACL
• AAAI
• IJCAI
• ICML
• NeurIPS
• ICLR
• EMNLP
• CVPR
• ECCV
• AISTATS
• ACM MM
• WACV
• COLM
• CoNLL
• IJCV
• IEEE TCSVT
• IEEE Multimedia
• TMLR