Silei Xu

许嗣磊

Education

• 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

Selected Publications

• 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

Honors and Awards

• 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