UC Merced NLP Lab

Our Location

UC Merced, according to US News 2024, is ranked 58th in the U.S. universities. In the UC system, its rank higher than UC Riverside (ranked 76th) and UC Santa Cruz (ranked 84th).

UC Merced is close to the Yosemite National Park and Silicon Valley, both of which require only 2 hours’ driving. Such a distance allows the flexible internship during learning. Our lab absolutely supports all the research internships even at the beginning of your Ph.D. study. Also, the advisors will utilize our own connections to help the students find the internship and job chances.

Our friends are at the following organizations:

Research Aim

At the UC Merced NLP Lab, we envision a future where large language model based AI systems converge to create trustworthy intelligent assistants to serve humans in all important scenarios, e.g., education, healthcare, creative work. Our mission is to pioneer transformative technologies at this intersection, developing next-generation AI systems that are both technologically advanced and human-centric, ultimately building the foundation for a mutual trusted, intelligent world. Our research focuses on large foundation models based trustworthy natural language processing and its applications as AI assistants. Our research considers not only textual but also vision data, with the target of understanding ubiquitos multi-modal data in real-world applications.

Team Advisors

Advisor: Assistant Professor, Yiwei Wang


Assistant Professor, Yiwei Wang

Yiwei Wang is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Merced. Ph.D. from NUS, MPhil from HKUST and B.S. from SEU. He serves as Area Chair for ICLR, ICML, IJCAI, ACL ARR, etc. Reviewer of TPAMI, TKDE, NeurIPS, KDD, WWW, AAAI, ICCV, CVPR, etc., Recognized as 1 out of 10 most innovative and impactful PhD students focusing on Data Science in Singapore by Singapore Data Science Consortium (SDSC) in 2020.

Senior Advisor: Professor, IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, Ming-Hsuan Yang


Professor, IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, Ming-Hsuan Yang

ACM Fellow and IEEE Fellow, Ming-Hsuan Yang is a Professor at University of California, Merced. Ph.D. from UIUC and B.S. from NTHU. He serves as Program Chair for ICCV and ACCV, and EiC of CVIU. Currently AEiC of PAMI and AE of IJCV. SAC/AC for top conferences in computer vision (CVPR, ICCV, ECCV) and machine learning (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML). His research has been recognized with Best Paper Award at ICML, Longuet-Higgins Prize at CVPR, and Best Paper Honorable Mentions at multiple venues. Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate Analytics, NSF CAREER Award recipient, and Google Faculty Award recipient.

Open Positions

We have multiple openings for PhD students, visiting students, research assistants, and interns:

1. PhD Students

3-5 full scholarship opportunities.

2. Visiting Students / Research Assistants / Interns

We welcome students (including qualified PhD students, master and undergraduate students, either online or in-person) to join our lab and participate in cutting-edge research projects.

Our Support and Expectations

Our research is highly interdisciplinary, involving collaboration with experts from NLP, computer vision, healthcare, and education. Our focus is primarily on publishing in top-tier AI conferences or journals, complemented by practical implementations. Our primary goal is to prepare our students for future academic positions as well as high-impact positions in industry. Here’s what we’re looking for and what you can expect from this journey:

1. What We Offer:

2. What We Expect from You:

How to apply

If you’re interested in joining UC Merced NLP Lab or would like more information, please contact me: