Hi there! I am a member of PolyU NLP Group. I obtained my PhD degree from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
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 that, I received my 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
[Oct. 2024] 🔥 Will be working as a Postdoctoral Fellow 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. Very excited!
[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. The first time to attend an in-person academic conference during my PhD and to visit abroad during my life!
[May 2023]   Got two papers accepted as Findings of ACL 2023!
[Apr. 2023]   Passed the confirmation of registration at PolyU. Officially became a PhD candidate!
Research
My recent research interests mainly involve the following directions:
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Conversational AI: Empower conversational agents with goal/target-oriented proactivity (ACL-Findings'23, TOIS'24, EMNLP'23), role consistentcy (ACL'24), emotional support (AAAI'24), etc.
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Situated & Embodied Intelligence: Investigate human-AI interactions in specific environments or situations (MM'24), learning from visual perceptions, language communications, and physical actions (EMNLP-Findings'24).
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Large Language Models (LLMs): Explore LLMs' reasoning & planning, mechanisms of safety alignment (arXiv'24), etc.
😀 We are actively seeking highly motivated PhD/master/undergraduate students for collaborative research, including but not limited to the above topics. Please feel free to reach out to me if you are interested.
Selected Publications
(see full list in Google Scholar) (*: equal contribution)
Preprint
No Two Devils Alike: Unveiling Distinct Mechanisms of Fine-tuning Attacks
Chak Tou Leong, Yi Cheng, Kaishuai Xu, Jian Wang, Hanlin Wang, Wenjie Li
arXiv:2405.16229, 2024.
[arXiv]
2021 - Present
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E2CL: Exploration-based Error Correction Learning for Embodied Agents
Hanlin Wang*, Chak Tou Leong*, Jian Wang, and Wenjie Li.
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP (EMNLP-Findings), 2024
[arXiv]
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SCREEN: A Benchmark for Situated Conversational Recommendation
Dongding Lin*, Jian Wang*, Chak Tou Leong, and Wenjie Li.
The 32nd ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2024.
[paper]
[code]
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.
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024.
[arXiv]
[paper]
[code]
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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]
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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]
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Target-oriented Proactive Dialogue Systems with Personalization: Problem Formulation and Dataset Curation
Jian Wang, Yi Cheng, Dongding Lin, Chak Tou Leong, and Wenjie Li.
The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
[arXiv]
[paper]
[code]
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Self-Detoxifying Language Models via Toxification Reversal
Chak Tou Leong, Yi Cheng, Jiashuo Wang, Jian Wang, and Wenjie Li.
The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
[arXiv]
[paper]
[code]
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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]
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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]
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COLA: Improving Conversational Recommender Systems by Collaborative Augmentation
Dongding Lin*, Jian Wang*, and Wenjie Li.
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023.
[arXiv]
[paper]
2018 - 2021 (Before PhD)
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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]
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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]
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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]
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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
Honors and Awards
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AAAI 2020 Student Scholarship
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First Class of Graduate Scholarship
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National Scholarship
Professional Activities
Academic Services
- Reviewer for ACL Rolling Review (ARR)
- Conference Reviewer: ACL (2023, 2024), EMNLP (2022, 2023, 2024), COLING (2020, 2022)
- Journal Reviewer: TKDE, TNNLS
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
Open-Source Projects
- 📖 Paper-Reading-ConvAI: Paper reading list in conversational AI (dialogue systems and NLG).
- 🐳 PyLoader: An asynchronous Python dataloader for loading big datasets.
Useful Resources
Misc.
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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.
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I dream of traveling around China and many places around the world someday.