Celine Lee

PhD candidate @ Cornell University, advised by Sasha Rush. I work on language modeling, with a special focus on code reasoning and generation.

I have worked with fantastic teams at Google Deepmind, Figma AI, IBM TJ Watson, Intel Labs, and the University of Pennsylvania (advised by Dan Roth). I devote energy to teaching and education; in Spring 2025, I was an Adjunct Instructor at the Mohamed Bin Zayed University of AI, and in Summer 2023 taught the Cornell's Break Through Tech Program.

Google Scholar.

Publications

The Efficiency Gap in Byte Modeling
Celine Lee, Jing Nathan Yan, Chen Liang, Jiaxin Shi, Yin Zhang, Jeremiah Liu, Pengcheng Yin, Fernando Pereira, Ed Chi, Derek Cheng, Alexander M. Rush, Ruoxi Wang
ICML 2026; ICLR 2026 - MMIntelligence Workshop (Oral)
Link

Critical Thinking: Which Kinds of Complexity Govern Optimal Reasoning Length?
Celine Lee, Alexander M. Rush, Keyon Vafa
ACL - Findings; IJCNLP-AACL 2025
Link. Video.

Commit0: Library Generation from Scratch
Wenting Zhao, Nan Jiang, Celine Lee, Justin T. Chiu, Claire Cardie, Matthias Gallé, Alexander M. Rush
ICLR 2025
Link

Sampling Language from Latent System-2 Reasoning
Celine Lee, Arafat Sultan, Tahira Naseem, Alexander M. Rush, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo
NeurIPS 2024 - System 2 Reasoning at Scale
Link

The Counterfeit Conundrum: Can Code Language Models Grasp the Nuances of Their Incorrect Generations?
Alex Gu, Celine Lee*, Wen-Ding Li*, Naman Jain*, Theo X. Olausson*, Koushik Sen, Armando Solar-Lezama
ACL 2024 - Findings
Link

Guess & Sketch: Language Model Guided Transpilation
Celine Lee, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Michal Kurek, Simone Campanoni, David Brooks, Stephen Chong, Gu-Yeon Wei, Alexander Rush
ICLR 2024
Link

Mixture of Soft Prompts for Controllable Data Generation
Derek Chen, Celine Lee, Yunan Lu, Domenic Rosati, Zhou Yu
EMNLP 2023 - Findings
Link

Batched Vectorized Earley Parsing
Celine Lee, Alexander M. Rush
MASC-SLL 2023
Link

A Survey on Semantic Parsing for Machine Programming
Celine Lee, Justin Gottschlich, Dan Roth
KDD Workshop 2021 - PLP
Link

Patents

• METHODS AND APPARATUS TO IMPROVE DATA QUALITY FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (USPTO App. No. 17/540050)
• METHODS AND APPARATUS TO TRAIN MODELS FOR PROGRAM SYNTHESIS (USPTO App. No. 17/551170)
• METHODS AND APPARATUS TO DETERMINE REFINED CONTEXT FOR SOFTWARE BUG DETECTION AND CORRECTION (USPTO App. No. 17/554918)
• METHODS, APPARATUS, AND ARTICLES OF MANUFACTURE TO GENERATE COMMAND LISTS TO BE OFFLOADED TO ACCELERATOR CIRCUITRY (USPTO App. No. 17/559556)

News

• April 2026 - I co-organized VerifAI 2 workshop @ ICLR 2026.
• October 2025 - I gave an invited talk at the Visions Workshop @ COLM 2025.
• April 2025 - I co-organized the VerifAI: AI Verification in the Wild workshop @ ICLR 2025.
• March 2025 - I am honored to be recognized as an ML & Systems Rising Star!
• January 2025 - I will be an Adjunct Instructor at MBZUAI for the semester!
• June 2024 - I was interviewed by Jennifer Sheffield for the Cognitive Computation Group Blog. Interview link.
• October 2021 - I was interviewed by Dr. Justin Gottschlich on the Machine Programming & Technology channel. Video

Misc.

Libary of writings, zines, some arts and crafts.

A running list of what-to-do ideas when you need some inspiration. Use them if that's fun for you

I like soup a lot.