About me

My name is Eugene Kwek, and I am a first-year PhD student at the University of Southern California, where I’m fortunate to be advised by Robin Jia. I completed by B.S. in computer science at Pennsylvania State University, where I was co-advised by Wenpeng Yin and Rui Zhang.

My interests include efficient ML and its usage in real-world applications.

News

May 2026: COMPACT was accepted at IJCAI 2026.
Apr 2026: Incredibly honored to be offered the NSF 2026 Graduate Research Fellowship!
Jan 2026: One paper accepted by ICLR 2026.
Jan 2026: Soprano has reached 1,000 stars on Github! Thank you for everyone’s interest!
Jan 2026: Selected as Honorable Mention for the 2025-2026 CRA Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.
Dec 2025: We released Soprano TTS, a high-fidelity text-to-speech model capable generating speech at up to 2000x realtime. Check it out on Github!
Sept 2025: COMPACT was accepted by the 1st Efficient Reasoning Workshop @ NeurIPS 2025.

Publications

Eugene Kwek, Feng Liu, Rui Zhang, Wenpeng Yin. CleanCodec: Efficient and Robust Speech Tokenization via Perceptually Guided Encoding. Preprint, 2026.
Nan Zhang, Eugene Kwek, Yusen Zhang, Muyu Pan, Suhang Wang, Prasenjit Mitra, Rui Zhang. QuantLRM: Quantization of Large Reasoning Models via Fine-Tuning Signals. Preprint, 2026.
Eugene Kwek and Wenpeng Yin. COMPACT: Common-Token Optimized Model Pruning Across Channels and Tokens. IJCAI, 2026.
Nan Zhang, Eugene Kwek, Yusen Zhang, Ngoc-Hieu Nguyen, Prasenjit Mitra, and Rui Zhang. When Reasoning Meets Compression: Understanding the Effects of LLMs Compression on Large Reasoning Models. ICLR, 2026.

Service

Reviewer: ER Workshop @ NeurIPS 2025, NewSumm Workshop @ EMNLP 2025, ARR January 2026

Awards

NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) Awardee
- Awarded by National Science Foundation, 2026
Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award Honorable Mention
- Awarded by Computing Research Association, 2026

Contact

Email: ekwek (at) usc (dot) edu