Sean Ren

Sean Ren is an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Southern California, where he holds the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Early Career Chair. He directs the INK Research Lab and serves as Research Team Leader at USC's Information Sciences Institute. Affiliated with the USC NLP Group and Machine Learning Center, his research focuses on developing robust NLP systems through knowledge-aware architectures and data-efficient learning.

His research interests include:

• Evaluation methods exposing NLP limitations in reasoning tasks
• Augmenting models with commonsense/knowledge via novel algorithms
• Graph neural networks for relational inference
• Model robustness verification and enhancement
• Neural-symbolic integration for interpretable AI

Recent publications demonstrate strong emphases on language model reasoning, knowledge distillation, and compositional generalization. His group's ACL/NeurIPS papers frequently address robustness gaps in state-of-the-art models.

Honors include:

• ACL Outstanding Paper (2023)
• MIT TR Innovator 35 Asia Pacific (2023)
• NSF CAREER Award (2021)
• Forbes 30 Under 30 (2019)
• ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award (2018)

Research is supported by NSF, DARPA, IARPA, and industry partners (Google, Amazon, Meta). He leads the INK Lab with focuses on label-efficient learning and knowledge-guided NLP, while actively recruiting PhD students for projects bridging symbolic and neural paradigms.