Percy Liang

I am drawn to simple things, want to understand things deeply, and like to build useful systems. I am interested in fundamental questions around learning and intelligence. How well can we learn in the data-limited, infinite compute regime? How do we model interestingness and curiosity? How can we push the frontier of human knowledge?

I lead Marin to build models openly. Here is a talk I gave about it. We practice a radical form of openness called open development, which goes beyond open-weight and open-source: Marin experiments (both successful and failed) are preregistered and live for everyone to see and engage with. Along with teaching CS336 (Language Models from Scratch), my goal is to enable everyone to understand, shape, and contribute to foundation model development.

In general, I am a strong proponent of efficient and reproducible research. I created CodaLab Worksheets, a platform that allows researchers to run and manage their experiments by maintaining the full provenance of an experiment from raw data to final results. Some of our papers are on CodaLab as executable papers.

Here is some code for older projects.

Rohith Kuditipudi (co-advised with John Duchi)
Steven Cao (co-advised with Gregory Valiant)
Ahmed Ahmed (co-advised with Sanmi Koyejo)
Moo Jin Kim (co-advised with Chelsea Finn)
Ken Liu (co-advised with Sanmi Koyejo)
Suhas Kotha (co-advised with Tatsunori Hashimoto)
Anne Ouyang (co-advised with Azalia Mirhoseini)
Kaiyue Wen (co-advised with Tengyu Ma)
Marina Zhang (co-advised with Carlos Guestrin)
A. Feder Cooper (post-doc, co-advised with Dan Ho)
Morris Yau (post-doc, co-advised with Chris Re)

Jonathan Berant (post-doc 2015, co-advised with Chris Manning, now professor at Tel-Aviv University)
Roy Frostig (Ph.D. 2016, now research scientist at Google, co-creator of JAX)
Sida Wang (Ph.D. 2017, co-advised with Chris Manning, now research scientist at Meta FAIR)
Yuchen Zhang (post-doc 2018, co-advised with Moses Charikar, now researcher at Semantic Machines → Bytedance → OpenAI)
He He (post-doc 2018, now assistant professor at New York University)
Arun Chaganty (Ph.D. 2018, now research scientist at Google → Augment Code → Anthropic)
Kelvin Guu (Ph.D. 2018, now research scientist at Google DeepMind → •)
Jacob Steinhardt (Ph.D. 2018, now associate professor at University of California Berkeley, founder of Transluce)
Tatsunori Hashimoto (post-doc 2019, co-advised with John Duchi, now assistant professor at Stanford University)
Fanny Yang (post-doc 2019, co-advised with John Duchi, now assistant professor at ETH Zurich)
Panupong (Ice) Pasupat (Ph.D. 2019, now research scientist at Google)
Daniel Selsam (Ph.D. 2019, co-advised with David Dill, now research scientist at Microsoft → OpenAI)
Robin Jia (Ph.D. 2020, now assistant professor at University of Southern California)
Stephen Mussmann (Ph.D. 2021, now assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology)
Pranav Rajpurkar (Ph.D. 2021, co-advised with Andrew Ng, now associate professor at Harvard University)
Fereshte Khani (Ph.D. 2021, now research scientist at Microsoft → OpenAI)
Aditi Raghunathan (Ph.D. 2021, now assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University)
Chris Donahue (post-doc 2022, now assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University)
Pang Wei Koh (Ph.D. 2022, now assistant professor at University of Washington)
Niladri Chatterji (post-doc 2023, co-advised with Tatsunori Hashimoto, now research scientist at Meta → OpenAI)
Shibani Santurkar (post-doc 2023, co-advised with Tatsunori Hashimoto and Tengyu Ma, now research scientist at OpenAI)
Dimitris Tsipras (post-doc 2023, co-advised with Gregory Valiant, now research scientist at OpenAI)
Yuhuai (Tony) Wu (post-doc 2023, co-advised with Jay McClelland, co-founder of xAI → •)
Yoav Levine (post-doc, 2023, now assistant professor at Tel Aviv University, co-founder of doubleAI)
Ananya Kumar (Ph.D. 2023, co-advised with Tengyu Ma, now research scientist at OpenAI → Meta TBD)
Mina Lee (Ph.D. 2023, now assistant professor at University of Chicago)
John Thickstun (post-doc 2024, now assistant professor at Cornell University)
John Hewitt (Ph.D. 2024, co-advised with Chris Manning, now assistant professor at Columbia University)
Shiori Sagawa (Ph.D. 2024, now research scientist at OpenAI)
(Sang) Michael Xie (Ph.D. 2024, co-advised with Tengyu Ma, now research scientist at Meta → OpenAI)
Michi Yasunaga (Ph.D. 2024, co-advised with Jure Leskovec, now research scientist at OpenAI → Meta TBD)
Qian Huang (on leave 2024, co-advised with Jure Leskovec, now xAI → Meta TBD)
Sarah Cen (post-doc 2025, co-advised with Dan Ho, now assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University)
Sherry Yang (post-doc 2025, now assistant professor at New York University)
Rishi Bommasani (Ph.D. 2025, co-advised with Dan Jurafsky, now senior research scholar at Stanford HAI)
Yann Dubois (Ph.D. 2025, co-advised with Tatsunori Hashimoto, now research scientist at OpenAI)
Sidd Karamcheti (Ph.D. 2025, co-advised with Dorsa Sadigh, will be assistant professor at Georgia Institute of Technology)
Xiang Lisa Li (Ph.D. 2025, co-advised with Tatsunori Hashimoto, will be assistant professor at University of Washington)
Nelson Liu (Ph.D. 2025, now research scientist at OpenAI)
Joon Sung Park (Ph.D. 2025, co-advised with Michael Bernstein, now founder and CEO of Simile)
Sam Park (post-doc 2026, co-advised with Tatsunori Hashimoto and James Zou, now researcher at Google DeepMind)

2012: post-doc at Google
2011: Ph.D. from Berkeley (advisors: Michael Jordan and Dan Klein)
2005: MEng from MIT (advisor: Michael Collins)
2004: B.S. from MIT

Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (2019)
IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (2016)
NSF CAREER Award (2016)
Sloan Research Fellowship (2015)
Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship (2014)
Graduate fellowships: NSF, NDSEG, GAANN, Siebel Scholar
Programming contests: 2nd place at 2002 ACM ICPC World Finals, silver medalist at IOI 2000
Music competitions (piano): Winner of KDFC Classical Star Search (2008, over-21 division), MIT Concerto Competition (2004), Phoenix Young Musicians Competition (2000)