Hi! I am a Staff AI Research Scientist at Zoom. Driven by a passion to make the digital world more accessible with large language models and conversational AI, I'm proudly a founding member of Stanford Open Virtual Assistant Lab (OVAL), co-founder of Genie virtual assistant, designer and builder of Zoom's AI Companion 2.0.
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Computer Science Department, Stanford University
Sep 2015 - Aug 2023,
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Supervisor: Prof. Monica S. Lam
Dissertation Commitee: Prof. Jure Leskovec, Prof. Chris Manning
Dissertation: Question Answering over the Semantic Web with
Neural Semantic Parsing
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese
University of Hong Kong
Aug 2012 - Nov 2014,
M.Phil. in Computer Science and Engineering
Supervisor: Prof. John C.S. Lui
Thesis: Product Selection Problem: Improve Market Share by Learning Consumer Behavior
School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science
and Technology of China
Aug 2008 - Jul 2012,
B.Eng. in Computer Science
Chain of Draft: Thinking Faster by Writing Less
Silei Xu, Wenhao Xie, Lingxiao Zhao, Pengcheng He
arXiv preprint, 2025
Press: [VentureBeat]
Instructional Segment Embedding: Improving LLM
Safety with Instruction Hierarchy
Tong Wu, Shujian Zhang, Kaiqiang Song, Silei Xu, Sanqiang Zhao, Ravi Agrawal, Sathish Reddy Indurthi,
Chong Xiang, Prateek Mittal, Wenxuan Zhou
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
WPO: Enhancing RLHF with Weighted Preference
Optimization
Wenxuan Zhou, Ravi Agrawal, Shujian Zhang, Sathish Reddy Indurthi, Sanqiang Zhao, Kaiqiang Song, Silei Xu, Chenguang Zhu
In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP),
2024
Fine-tuned LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less with
Few-Shot Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing over Wikidata
Silei Xu*, Shicheng Liu*, Theo Culhane, Elizaveta Pertseva, Meng-Hsi Wu, Sina J. Semnani, Monica S. Lam
(*: equal contribution)
In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP),
2023
A Few-Shot Semantic Parser for
Wizard-of-Oz Dialogues with the Precise ThingTalk Representation
Giovanni Campagna, Sina J. Semnani, Ryan Kearns, Lucas Jun Koba Sato, Silei Xu, Monica S. Lam
In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2022
AutoQA: From
Databases To Q&A Semantic Parsers With Only Synthetic Training Data
Silei Xu*, Sina J. Semnani*, Giovanni Campagna, and Monica S. Lam (*: equal contribution)
In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP),
2020
Localizing Q&A Semantic
Parsers for Any Language In a Day
Mehrad Moradshahi, Giovanni Campagna, Sina J. Semnani, Silei Xu, Monica S. Lam
In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP),
2020
Schema2QA:
High-Quality and Low-Cost Q&A Agents for the Structured Web
Silei Xu, Giovanni Campagna, Jian Li, and Monica S. Lam
In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
(CIKM), 2020
Genie: A Generator of
Natural Language Semantic Parsers for Virtual Assistant Commands
Giovanni Campagna*, Silei Xu*, Mehrad Moradshahi, and Monica S. Lam (*: equal contribution)
In Proceedings of the 40th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation
(PLDI), 2019
Controlling Fine-Grain
Sharing in Natural Language with a Virtual Assistant
Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, Rakesh Ramesh, Michael Fischer, and Monica S. Lam
In Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies (IMWUT,
presented at UbiComp), 2018
Brassau: Automatically
Generating Graphical User Interfaces for Virtual Assistant
Michael Fischer, Giovanni Campagna, Silei Xu, and Monica S. Lam
In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and
Services. (MobileHCI), 2018
Almond: The Architecture of an
Open, Crowdsourced, Privacy-Preserving, Programmable
Virtual Assistant
Giovanni Campagna, Rakesh Ramesh, Silei Xu, Michael Fischer, and Monica S. Lam
In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW), 2017
Product Selection Problem: Improve
Market Share by Learning Consumer
Behavior
Silei Xu and John C.S Lui
In ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data
(TKDD), 2016
Product Selection Problem: Improve
Market Share by Learning Consumer
Behavior
Silei Xu and John C.S Lui
In Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(KDD), 2014
[presentation video]
A Provable Algorithmic Approach
to Product Selection Problems for
Market Entry and Sustainability
Silei Xu, Yishi Lin, Hong Xie and John C.S. Lui
In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Scientific and Statistical
Database Management (SSDBM), 2014
Single Disk Failure Recovery for X-code-based Parallel Storage
Systems
Silei Xu, Runhui Li, Patrick P.C. Lee, Yunfeng Zhu, Liping
Xiang, Yinlong Xu, John C.S. Lui
In IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), 2013
The Greatest
Innovations of 2019 by Popular Science
Almond assistant (later renamed to Genie) is one of the very few university projects in the list.
Other winners include Apple AirPods, Oculus Quest, Impossible Foods.
Press: [New York Times]
2014 SIGKDD Conference Best Paper Final List (9/151), 2014
Invited to the special issue of TKDD as best papers of KDD'14
Anhui Computer Federation Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis, 2012
Top 10 theses in Anhui Province
Excellent Paper Award for Undergraduate Research Program, 2012