Jian Wang (王健) Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China Email: jian51.wang (at) polyu.edu.hk   or                jwanglvy (at) gmail.com Google Scholar   |   Github   |   Twitter

Hi there! I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at PolyU NLP Group. I earned my PhD degree from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2024, supervised by Prof. Maggie Wenjie Li. During the spring and summer of 2024, I visited the SLED Lab at University of Michigan, where I was so honored to work with Prof. Joyce Chai.

Prior to my PhD, I obtained MSc and BEng degrees from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology. During my graduate studies, I was fortunate to be co-advised by Prof. Min Yang at SIAT, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

News

[Nov. 2025] 🔥 Will be heading to Suzhou for EMNLP 2025. Welcome to have a chat!

[Jun. 2025] 🔥 Our ACL paper was selected as an oral presentation (Top 8%)! Congrats to Chak Tou Leong!

[May. 2025]   Got three papers accepted by ACL 2025! Welcome to have a chat in Vienna.

[Feb. 2025]   Thrilled to be awarded the PolyU Postdoc Matching Fund!

[Nov. 2024]   Started to work as a Postdoc at PolyU NLP Group.

[Sep. 2024]   Defended my PhD thesis. Huge thanks to my supervisor and committee members!

[May 2024]   Got one paper accepted by ACL 2024! Welcome to have a chat in Bangkok.

[Dec. 2023]   Will be visiting the SLED Lab at University of Michigan, starting from Feb. 2024. This is so exciting!

[Oct. 2023]   Got two papers accepted by EMNLP 2023! Will be heading to Singpore in December.

[Jul. 2023]   Will be heading to Toronto for ACL 2023. This is the first time to attend an in-person academic conference during my PhD and the first time to visit abroad during my life!

Research

My research interests are in natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs), and AI more broadly. Recently, I have been focusing on the following directions:

• LLM-powered Agents: world models for planning (arXiv'26), task tutoring (ACL-Findings'25b), agentic RL (arXiv'25), context/memory management, embodied agents, etc.
• Reasoning and Scaling: strategic reasoning, reasoning belief (arXiv'26), test-time scaling (arXiv'25a), latent reasoning (arXiv'25b), safety alignment (ACL'25), etc.
• Interaction and Conversation: situated recommendation, proactive dialogue systems (TNNLS'23, TOIS'24), dialogue consistency (ACL'24), personalized role-playing (EMNLP'23), etc.

👉 Welcome highly motivated students to collaborate on research projects related to (but not limited to) the topics mentioned above. If you are interested, please feel free to drop me an email.

Selected Publications

(see full list in Google Scholar) (*: Equal contribution; ^†: Corresponding author)

Preprints

• 

  Imagine-then-Plan: Agent Learning from Adaptive Lookahead with World Models

  Youwei Liu, Jian Wang^†, Hanlin Wang, Beichen Guo, Wenjie Li.
  arXiv:2601.08955
  arXiv

• 

  Finding RELIEF: Shaping Reasoning Behavior without Reasoning Supervision via Belief Engineering

  Chak Tou Leong, Dingwei Chen, Heming Xia, Qingyu Yin, Sunbowen Lee, Jian Wang^†, Wenjie Li.
  arXiv:2601.13752
  arXiv

• 

  SPA-RL: Reinforcing LLM Agents via Stepwise Progress Attribution

  Hanlin Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Jiashuo Wang, Jian Wang^†, Wenjie Li.
  arXiv:2505.20732, 2025
  arXiv | Github

• 

  Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

  Xinghao Chen, Anhao Zhao, Heming Xia, Xuan Lu, Hanlin Wang, Yanjun Chen, Wei Zhang, Jian Wang^†, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen^†.
  arXiv:2505.16782, 2025
  arXiv | Github

2025 - Present

• 

  Towards Harmless Multimodal Assistants with Blind Preference Optimization

  Yongqi Li, Lu Yang, Jian Wang, Runyang You, Wenjie Li, Liqiang Nie.
  The 33rd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2025.
  Paper | Github

• 

  Why Safeguarded Ships Run Aground? Aligned Large Language Models' Safety Mechanisms Tend to Be Anchored in The Template Region

  Chak Tou Leong, Qingyu Yin, Jian Wang^†, Wenjie Li.
  The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025.
  arXiv | Paper | Github

• 

  STeCa: Step-level Trajectory Calibration for LLM Agent Learning

  Hanlin Wang, Jian Wang^†, Chak Tou Leong, Wenjie Li.
  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL (ACL-Findings), 2025
  arXiv | Paper | Github

• 

  Training Turn-by-Turn Verifiers for Dialogue Tutoring Agents: The Curious Case of LLMs as Your Coding Tutors

  Jian Wang, Yinpei Dai, Yichi Zhang, Ziqiao Ma, Wenjie Li, Joyce Chai.
  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL (ACL-Findings), 2025
  arXiv | Paper | Github

2020 - 2024 (before and during PhD)

• 

  Instruct Once, Chat Consistently in Multiple Rounds: An Efficient Tuning Framework for Dialogue

  Jian Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Jiashuo Wang, Dongding Lin, Wenjie Li, Xiao-Yong Wei.
  The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024.
  arXiv | Paper | Github

• 

  SCREEN: A Benchmark for Situated Conversational Recommendation

  Dongding Lin*, Jian Wang*, Chak Tou Leong, Wenjie Li.
  The 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2024.
  Paper | Github

• 

  COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal

  Yi Cheng, Wenge Liu, Jian Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Yi Ouyang, Wenjie Li, Xian Wu, Yefeng Zheng.
  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024.
  arXiv | Paper | Github

• 

  Target-constrained Bidirectional Planning for Generation of Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue

  Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, Wenjie Li.
  ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 2024.
  arXiv | Paper | Github

• 

  Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curation

  Jian Wang, Yi Cheng, Dongding Lin, Chak Tou Leong, Wenjie Li.
  The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
  arXiv | Paper | Github

• 

  Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversal

  Chak Tou Leong, Yi Cheng, Jiashuo Wang, Jian Wang, Wenjie Li.
  The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
  arXiv | Paper | Github

• 

  Dialogue Planning via Brownian Bridge Stochastic Process for Goal-directed Proactive Dialogue

  Jian Wang*, Dongding Lin*, Wenjie Li.
  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL (ACL-Findings), 2023.
  arXiv | Paper | Github

• 

  A Target-driven Planning Approach for Goal-directed Dialog Systems

  Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, Wenjie Li.
  IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2023.
  Paper | PDF | Github

• 

  Template-guided Clarifying Question Generation for Web Search Clarification

  Jian Wang and Wenjie Li.
  ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), 2021.
  Paper | Slides | Github

• 

  Dual Dynamic Memory Network for End-to-End Multi-turn Task-oriented Dialog Systems

  Jian Wang, Junhao Liu, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, Kejing He, Ruifeng Xu, Min Yang.
  International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2020.
  Paper | Github

• 

  Improving Knowledge-aware Dialogue Generation via Knowledge Base Question Answering

  Jian Wang, Junhao Liu, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, Kejing He, Ruifeng Xu, Min Yang.
  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020.
  arXiv | Paper | Github

• 

  Topic Discovery by Spectral Decomposition and Clustering with Coordinated Global and Local Contexts

  Jian Wang, Kejing He, Min Yang.
  International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics (JMLC), 2020.
  Paper | PDF

Invited Talks

• Stepwise Verification in LLM Agents: Planning, Tutoring, and Test-time Scaling. @SUSTech, Shenzhen. Dec. 2025
• Dialogue Tutoring Agents in Coding. @NICE Platform, Online. Jun. 2025
• Knowledge-Enhanced Machine Conversation. @CUMT, Online. Sep. 2022
• Text Planning in Natural Language Generation. @Baidu AI, Online. Sep. 2022

Honors and Awards

• Postdoc Matching Fund (Awarded by PolyU, 2025)
• Third Prize of 2021 Language and Intelligence Challenge (Awarded by CCF-CIPS-Baidu, 2021)
• Third Prize of Byte Cup 2018 IML Contest (Awarded by CAAI-ByteDance, 2018)
• AAAI Student Scholarship (2020)
• National Scholarship (2016)
• Merit Student of Sichuan Province (2013)

Professional Activities

Academic Services

• Area Chair: ACL Rolling Review (ARR), ACL (2026), IJCNLP-AACL (2025)
• Session Chair: ACL (2025), IJCNLP-AACL (2025)
• Conference Reviewer: ICLR, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, COLING
• Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)

Teaching Assistant

• COMP 6709: Advanced Natural Language Processing, Spring 2023, PolyU
• COMP 6709: Advanced Natural Language Processing, Spring 2022, PolyU
• COMP 2021: Object-Oriented Programming, Fall 2022, PolyU
• COMP 2021: Object-Oriented Programming, Fall 2021, PolyU
• Algorithm Design and Analysis, Spring 2018, SCUT
• Advanced Programming Language (C++), Fall 2017, SCUT

Open-Source Projects

• 📖 Paper-Reading-ConvAI : Paper reading list in conversational AI.
• 🐳 PyLoader: An asynchronous Python dataloader for loading big datasets.

Useful Resources

• 📝 Highly Opinionated Advice on How to Write ML Papers (by Neel Nanda).
• 📝 A long talk about "Writing Perfect Papers" (Slides | Youtube | Bilibili) (by Prof. Baochun Li).
• 🍷 Lilian Weng's Blog: Lilian Weng's blog with broad learning notes about DL/NLP.
• 📰 Sebastian Ruder's Blog: Sebastian Ruder's blog with deep insights about NLP/ML/DL.
• 📸 Jay Alammar's Blog: Visualizations and animations for many language models (Transformer, BERT, etc).
• 📡 Scientific Spaces: Jianlin Su's blog (in Chinese) about ML|NLP theories with deep explorations.
• 👩‍🎓 Global Equality for PhDs: Resources to help global equality for PhDs in NLP/AI, contributed by Zhijing Jin.

Misc.

• I enjoy many ball games such as basketball, table tennis, billiards, and badminton. I also spend my leisure time on variety shows, literature books, and movies.

• I dream of traveling around China and many places of interest around the world someday.