About Me

Hello! I’m a Research MSc student in Computer Science at Mcgill University and Quebec AI Institute (Mila), advised by Prof. Jackie Chi Kit Cheung. Before my master’s studies, I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Joint Honours Mathematics and Computer Science at McGill University. My research focuses on reasoning, hallucination, evaluation, and interpretability in large language models, with the goal of better understanding and improving their behaviour and efficiency.

For the 2025-2026 academic year, I am co-organizing the Mila/McGill NLP Reading Group and co-instructing the McGill Computational and Data Systems Initiative (CDSI) LLM & Applications workshop series. Previously, I was a Research Fellow at RBC Borealis, where I was mentored by Leila Pishdad and Yanshuai Cao.

Publications

• Can LLMs Reason Abstractly Over Math Word Problems Without CoT? Disentangling Abstract Formulation From Arithmetic Computation
  EMNLP 2025
  Ziling Cheng, Meng Cao, Leila Pishdad, Yanshuai Cao, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

• LLM Explainability in Handbook of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (Xu, W. (eds)).
  Springer.
  Ines Arous, Khaoula Chehbouni, Ziling Cheng, Bonaventure Dossou

• Stochastic Chameleons: Irrelevant Context Hallucinations Reveal Class-Based (Mis) Generalization in LLMs
  ACL 2025
  Ziling Cheng*, Meng Cao*, Marc-Antoine Rondeau, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

• McGill BabyLM Shared Task Submission: The Effects of Data Formatting and Structural Biases
  In Proceedings of the BabyLM Challenge at CoNLL 2023
  Ziling Cheng, Rahul Aralikatte, Ian Porada, Cesare Spinoso-Di Piano, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung

• Vārta: A Large-Scale Headline-Generation Dataset for Indic Languages
  Findings of ACL 2023
  Rahul Aralikatte*, Ziling Cheng*, Sumanth Doddapaneni, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung