Jian Wang (王健) PhD Student Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China Email: jian-dylan.wang (at) connect.polyu.hk   or                jwanglvy (at) gmail.com Resume   |   Github   |   Google Scholar   |   Twitter

I am a third-year PhD student at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, advised by Prof. Maggie Wenjie Li. Currently, I am visiting the SLED Lab at University of Michigan, where I am honored to work with Prof. Joyce Chai.

Before that, I received my MSc and BEng degrees from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology (SCUT), in 2020 and 2017, respectively. During the 2018 to 2019 period, I was fortunate to be co-advised by Prof. Min Yang at SIAT, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Research

I have broad interests in Conversational AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP), including but not limited to the following directions:

• Interactive dialogue systems (e.g., goal/target-directed dialogues, task-oriented dialogues). I am dedicated to empowering agents to interact with humans through natural, coherent, and proactive conversations.
• Natural language generation. I am interested in how world knowledge (e.g., commonsense, social, and physical knowledge) can be grounded and incorporated in natural language generation.
• Situated and multimodal interactions. I am interested in human-AI collaborations in specific scenarios and learning from situated communications (e.g., situated dialogues).

Selected Publications

(see full list in Google Scholar)

Preprint

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

  Jian Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Jiashuo Wang, Dongding Lin, Wenjie Li, and Xiao-Yong Wei.
  arXiv:2402.06967, 2024.
  [arXiv]

2021 - Present

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

  Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, and Wenjie Li.
  ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), 2024.
  [arXiv] [paper] [code]

• COOPER: Coordinating Specialized Agents towards a Complex Dialogue Goal

  Yi Cheng, Wenge Liu, Jian Wang, Chak Tou Leong, Yi Ouyang, Wenjie Li, Xian Wu, and Yefeng Zheng.
  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024.
  [arXiv] [paper] [code]

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

  Jian Wang, Yi Cheng, Dongding Lin, Chak Tou Leong, and Wenjie Li.
  Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
  [arXiv] [paper] [code]

• Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversal

  Chak Tou Leong, Yi Cheng, Jiashuo Wang, Jian Wang, and Wenjie Li.
  Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
  [arXiv] [paper] [code]

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

  Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, and Wenjie Li.
  Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL (ACL-Findings), 2023.
  [arXiv] [paper] [code]

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

  Jian Wang, Dongding Lin, and Wenjie Li.
  IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), 2023.
  [paper] [PDF] [code]

• COLA: Improving Conversational Recommender Systems by Collaborative Augmentation

  Dongding Lin*, Jian Wang*, and Wenjie Li.     (*: Equal Contribution)
  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023.
  [arXiv] [paper]

2018 - 2021 (Before PhD)

• 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] [code]

• 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, and Min Yang.
  International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), 2020.
  [paper] [code]

• Improving Knowledge-aware Dialogue Generation via Knowledge Base Question Answering

  Jian Wang, Junhao Liu, Wei Bi, Xiaojiang Liu, Kejing He, Ruifeng Xu, and Min Yang.
  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2020.
  [arXiv] [paper] [code]

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

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

Experiences

• 2024/02 - Present: Visiting PhD Student at University of Michigan (Advisor: Prof. Joyce Chai)
• 2020/11 - 2021/08: Research assistant at PolyU (Advisor: Prof. Maggie Wenjie Li)
• 2020/07 - 2020/10: Research intern at Rulai Inc. (Advisor: Dr. Yi Zhang)
• 2018/08 - 2019/09: Visiting graduate student at SIAT, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Advisor: Prof. Min Yang)

Competitions

• [2021/06] Third Prize of 2021 Baidu Language and Intelligence Challenge: Multi-skill Dialogue
• [2018/12] Third Prize of Byte Cup 2018 International Machine Learning Contest
• [2017/10] Global Ranking of 50/2121 on IEEE Xtreme 11.0 Programming Competition
• [2016/05] Bronze Medal of 2016 HUAWEI Code Craft (Shenzhen Area Site)

Professional Activities

Teaching Assistant

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

Reviewer

• ACL ARR, ACL (2023), EMNLP (2022, 2023), COLING (2020, 2022)

Open-Source Projects

• 📖 Paper-Reading-ConvAI: Reading list in dialogue systems and natural language generation.
• 🐳 PyLoader: An asynchronous Python dataloader for loading big datasets.

Useful Resources

• ⏳ AI Conference Deadlines: Countdowns to top CV/NLP/ML/Robotics/AI conference deadlines.
• 📝 Writing Perfect Papers (Bilibili | Youtube | Slides): A long talk on writing "perfect papers" (by Prof. Baochun Li).
• 📰 Sebastian Ruder's Blog: Sebastian Ruder's blog with deep insights about NLP/ML/DL.
• 🍑 Lilian Weng's Blog: Lilian Weng's blog with broad learning notes about DL/NLP.
• 📸 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.

Misc.

• I enjoy Chinese calligraphy and most outdoor sports (especially basketball, table tennis, and badminton). I also spend my leisure time on variety shows, literature books, and movies.

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