Yapei Chang

About Me

Hi! I’m a PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Mohit Iyyer with a research focus on NLP. Prior to transferring to UMD, I was affiliated with the UMass Amherst NLP Lab, where I was also advised by Mohit. My main interests include:

• Evaluating long-form generation, and building the data to do it at scale [CLIPPER (COLM’25), FABLES (COLM’24), BooookScore (ICLR’24)]
• Cheap, automatic scores as rewards for open-ended post-training [How2Everything (ICML’26), Semantically-Aware Rewards (preprint), BLEUBERI (NeurIPS’25)]
• Evaluating LLMs through a human-centered lens: how machine and human writing differ, and what readers actually prefer [Argument Collapse (EMNLP’26), AutoFiction (ICML’26 Workshop)]

I also contribute to open model efforts: Olmo 3 at Ai2, and the next generation of Nemotron models at NVIDIA (in progress).

I like gaming and tinkering with mechanical keyboards in the free time I aggregate from my fluctuating work-life balance (it’s a work in progress ┐(‘～` )┌).

Updates

Selected Publications

For the complete list of publications, please visit Google Scholar.

Projects