Hi! I am a final-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at Columbia University, advised by David Blei. My research is at the intersection of NLP and probabilistic machine learning.

I’m especially interested in:

• developing models that learn interpretable latent concepts from text
• understanding how LLMs encode concepts and implement algorithms through the lens of mechanistic interpretability

During my PhD, I spent two summers interning at Meta in applied AI for recommendation systems. Previously, I completed my undergrad and master’s at Penn, and was part of Chris Callison-Burch’s lab. I also spent a summer at Columbia Business School working with Andrey Simonov.

email: cz2539 at columbia dot edu
[google scholar] [github] [cv]

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Publications

(* = equal contribution)

Model Directions, Not Words: Mechanistic Topic Models Using Sparse Autoencoders
Carolina Zheng*, Nicolas Beltran-Velez*, Sweta Karlekar*, Claudia Shi, Achille Nazaret, Asif Mallik, Amir Feder, David M. Blei
Under review
[paper] [code coming soon!]

Enhancing Embedding Representation Stability in Recommendation Systems with Semantic ID
Carolina Zheng, Minhui Huang, Dmitrii Pedchenko, Kaushik Rangadurai, Siyu Wang, Gaby Nahum, Jie Lei, Yang Yang, Tao Liu, Zutian Luo, Xiaohan Wei, Dinesh Ramasamy, Jiyan Yang, Yiping Han, Lin Yang, Hangjun Xu, Rong Jin, Shuang Yang
RecSys 2025 (Industry Track, Oral)
[paper]

Hypothesis Testing the Circuit Hypothesis in LLMs
Claudia Shi*, Nicolas Beltran-Velez*, Achille Nazaret*, Carolina Zheng*, Adrià Garriga-Alonso, Andrew Jesson, Maggie Makar, David M. Blei
NeurIPS 2024
[paper] [code]

Revisiting Topic-Guided Language Models
Carolina Zheng, Keyon Vafa, David M. Blei
TMLR 2023
[paper] [code]

An Invariant Learning Characterization of Controlled Text Generation
Carolina Zheng*, Claudia Shi*, Keyon Vafa, Amir Feder, David M. Blei
ACL 2023
[paper] [code]

Do Suspense and Surprise Drive Entertainment Demand? Evidence from Twitch.tv
Andrey Simonov, Raluca Ursu, Carolina Zheng
Journal of Marketing Research, 2022
[paper]

Complexity-Weighted Loss and Diverse Reranking for Sentence Simplification
Reno Kriz, João Sedoc, Marianna Apidianaki, Carolina Zheng, Gaurav Kumar, Eleni Miltsakaki, Chris Callison-Burch
NAACL 2019
[paper]