I am a PhD student at Northeastern University, advised by Prof. Weiyan Shi. I was a scholar in the MATS program, working on reasoning at Prof. Dawn Song’s Lab. I obtained my Master’s degree in Computer Science at UMass Amherst where I was lucky to be advised by Prof. Andrew McCallum and Prof. Hong Yu. I finished my undergraduate study in Computer Science at HKUST.

I am seeking a research internship for Summer 2026. Please feel free to contact me if you believe there is a potential fit.

Publications

2025

• LLMs Encode Harmfulness and Refusal Separately
  Jiachen Zhao, Jing Huang, Zhengxuan Wu, David Bau, Weiyan Shi
  Neurips 2025.
  [pdf]

2024

• Large Language Models are In-context Teachers for Knowledge Reasoning
  Jiachen Zhao, Zonghai Yao, Zhichao Yang, Hong Yu
  EMNLP 24 Findings.
  [pdf]

• Learning and Forgetting Unsafe Examples in Large Language Models
  Jiachen Zhao, Zhun Deng, David Madras, James Zou, Mengye Ren
  ICML 24.
  [pdf]

• Multistage Collaborative Knowledge Distillation from a Large Language Model for Semi-Supervised Sequence Generation
  Jiachen Zhao, Wenlong Zhao*, Andrew Drozdov*, Benjamin Rozonoyer, Md Arafat Sultan, Jay-Yoon Lee, Mohit Iyyer, Andrew McCallum
  ACL 24.
  [pdf]
  

• Adaptive Fusion of Deep Learning with Statistical Anatomical Knowledge for Robust Patella Segmentation from CT Images
  Jiachen Zhao, Tianshu Jiang, Yi Lin, Justin Chan, Ping-Keung Lewis Chan, Chunyi Wen, Hao Chen
  Journal of Biomedical & Health Informatics.
  [code] [pdf]
  

2023

• SELF-EXPLAIN: Teaching Large Language Models to Reason Complex Questions by Themselves
  Jiachen Zhao, Zonghai Yao, Zhichao Yang, Hong Yu
  Workshop on robustness of zero/few-shot learning in foundation models @ NIPS 23.
  [pdf]
  

• Student as an Inherent Denoiser of Noisy Teacher
  Jiachen Zhao
  3rd Workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing @ NIPS 23.
  [pdf]
  

• In-Context Exemplars as Clues to Retrieving from Large Associative Memory
  Jiachen Zhao
  Neural Conversational AI @ ICML 23. Associative Memory & Hopfield Networks @ NIPS 23.
  [pdf]
  

2022

• Trigger-free Event Detection via Derangement Reading Comprehension
  Jiachen Zhao, Haiqin Yang
  arXiv.
  [pdf]
  

Academic service

Reviewer for ICML, Neurips, CoNLL, AAAI, ICLR