Hongru WANG Hongru WANG

Hongru WANG

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management,

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

About Me CV

I am currently a final-year Ph.D. Candidate at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (expected to graduate on July 2025, actively seeking postdoc positions), very honored and fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Kam-Fai WONG. Before that, I obtained my Bachelor's degree and Master's degree from the Communication University of China and The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020, respectively. During my PhD, I am happy and honored to visit The University of Edinburgh (EdinburghNLP), working closely with Prof. Jeff Z. Pan and Prof. Pasquale Minervini. Besides that, I am co-founder and organizer of NLP Academic Exchange Platform (NICE), which provide a platform to share and discuss recent progress in NLP. 📚📚📚

My research focus revolves around reasoning and acting of personalized language agents, designed to seamlessly unifing them from tool perspective such as regarding reasoning as internal cognitive tools while acting as external physical tools instead of treat them in isolation. My long-term objective is to achieve the ''impossible triangle'' between safety, personalization and autonomy of language agent. If you are interested in my research (more details can be found below), I dedicate 60 minutes per week to chat with persons from all over the world, feel free to say hi if you want to discuss or cooperate. Schedule meeting with me! 📆

Research Interest

  • Dialogue System: Prior to LLMs, I focus on task-oriented dialogue system, especially the natural langugae understanding (MCML), and dialogue policy learning (PPO-Off-Comb, Survey of DPL). We build a first Cantonese task-oriented dialogue dataset -- KddRES. Then I turn to open-domain dialogue system, especially the interal reasoning capabilities of LLMs (Cue-CoT) and how they interect with external multiple knowledge sources (SAFARI, UniMS-RAG). We recently survey the evolution of dialogue system based on language model (from ToD to ODD, and then unified dialogue system) (LM-based DS).

  • Tool Learning: Besides only modelling physical tools, such as models and APIs, I am interested in how internal cognitive tools (TPE), like different conversational strategies and reasoning methods, can be combined with external physical tools. I am attracted to the whole life cycle of tool learning, such as tool creation (UniRetriever), tool selection (Self-DC, AppBench) and tool utilization (M3SUM). Utilizing tool learning to empower LLMs for real-world interaction is both intriguing and impactful. You can check our latest tutorial at SIGIR: Empoweing LLMs: Tool learning for Real-world Interaction.

  • Language Agents: More broadly, I believe dialogue will be the entrance of next human-ai interaction, similar like human beings. To this end, I also focus other aspects of diague agents, including but not limited to safety (INDust, Self-Guard), role-playing (REGA), memory (PerLTQA), factuality (K-Dial) and proactivity (Pro-CoT).

News

Competition and Conference [Full]

  • Sep 2024: One paper is accepted by MINT Workshop@NeruIPS 2024. This is a very interesting and insighful analysis paper about knowledge conflict.
  • Sep 2024: One paper is accepted by NeruIPS 2024. Congratulations to all co-authors. This is my first paper at ML top conferences.
  • Sep 2024: Fives papers are accepted by EMNLP 2024 (3 main 2 findings), including my first-author work: AppBench. AppBench is the first benchmark focus on the execution of multiple APIs from various Apps (graph strcuture and persmission management). This is the future Apple Intelligence ! 🔥 🔥 🔥
  • Aug 2024: One paper is accepted by NLPCC 2024, see u at Hangzhou, a very nice and beautiful place.
  • May 2024: Two papers are accepted by ACL 2024, But non-first authors. Sad story, should work harder.
  • May 2024: We won the champion of Online Safety Prize Challenge organized by AI singapore [My Certification]
  • Apr 2024: We are about to organize the SIGIR 2024 tutorial: Empowering Large Language Models: Tool Learning for Real-World Interaction 😍
  • Mar 2024: Three papers are accepted by NAACL 2024, including one co-first author work: INDust targets inductive instructions of users, accompany with Dual-critique method. 😍
  • Mar 2024: One paper KddRES, which is a first Cantonese task-oriented dialogue dataset, is accepted by the journal of Computer Speech and Language (SCI Q2, IF: 4.3).
  • Feb 2024: Three papers are accepted by LREC-COLING 2024, including one first-author work: UniRetriever. 😍
  • Jan 2024: Very happy to receive visiting offer from University of Edinburgh, and see u at Europe!!

Selected Publications

Journal and conference [Full]

AppBench: Planning of Multiple APIs from Various APPs for Complex Instruction
Hongru WANG, Rui Wang, Boyang XUE, Heming Xia, Jingtao Cao, Zeming Liu, Jeff Z. Pan, Kam-Fai Wong
EMNLP 2024 (apple intelligence, graph execution, permission management) Code Poster
TPE: Towards Better Compositional Reasoning over Conceptual Tools ..
Hongru WANG, Huimin Wang, Lingzhi Wang, et. al, Kam-Fai Wong
NLPCC 2024 (first work to utilize cognitive/conceptual tool in dialogue agent)
Empowering Large Language Models: Tool Learning for Real-World Interaction
Hongru WANG, Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Jeff Z. Pan and Kam-Fai Wong
Tutorial, SIGIR 2024 (first comprehensive tutorial about tool learning)
Enhancing Large Language Models Against Inductive Instructions with Dual-critique ..
Rui Wang*, Hongru WANG*, Fei Mi, Yi Chen, Boyang Xue, Kam-Fai Wong, Ruifeng Xu
NAACL 2024
KddRES: A Multi-level Knowledge-driven Dialogue Dataset for Restaurant ..
Hongru WANG, Wai-Chung Kwan, Min Li, Zimo Zhou, Kam-Fai Wong
Computer Speech and Language (SCI Q2, IF: 4.3)
UniRetriever: Multi-task Candidates Selection for Various Context-Adaptive ..
Hongru WANG, Boyang Xue, Baohang Zhou, et. al, Yasheng Wang, Kam-Fai Wong
LREC-COLING 2024
M3Sum: A Novel Unsupervised Language-guided Video Summarization
Hongru WANG*, Baohang Zhou*, Zhengkun Zhang, Yiming Du, David Ho, Kam-Fai Wong
ICASSP 2024 (using ChatGPT to edit video) (oral)
Large Language Models as Source Planner for Personalized ..
Hongru Wang, Minda Hu, Yang Deng, et. al, Irwin King, Kam-Fai Wong
Findings, EMNLP 2023
Best Paper Award @ International Doctoral Forum (2023)
Code Poster PPT
Cue-CoT: Chain-of-thought Prompting for Responding to In-depth Dialogue ..
Hongru Wang*, Rui Wang*, Fei Mi, Yang Deng, Zezhong Wang, Bin Liang, Ruifeng Xu, Kam-Fai Wong
Findings, EMNLP 2023 Code Poster PPT
MCML: A Novel Memory-based Contrastive Meta-Learning Method for Few Shot Slot Tagging
Hongru Wang, Zezhong Wang, Wai-Chung Kwan, Kam-Fai Wong
IJCNLP-AACL 2023 (oral)
A Survey on Recent Advances and Challenges in Reinforcement Learning Methods..
Wai-Chung Kwan*, Hongru WANG*, Huimin Wang, Kam-Fai Wong
Machine Intelligence Research
Integrating Pretrained Language Model for Dialogue Policy Learning
Hongru WANG, Huimin Wang, Zezhong Wang, Kam-Fai Wong
ICASSP 2022 (probably the first work of RLHF)
CUHK at SemEval-2020 Task 4: CommonSense Explanation, Reasoning and Prediction ..
Hongru WANG, Xiangru Tang, Sunny Lai, Kwong Sak Leung, Jia Zhu, Gabriel, and Kam-Fai WONG
SemEval of COLING 2020

Preprint

Draft and Under Review

UniMS-RAG: A Unified Multi-source RAG for Personalized Dialogue Systems
Hongru Wang, Wenyu Huang, Yang Deng, et. al, Jeff Z Pan, Kam-Fai Wong
Under Review
Steering Knowledge Selection Behaviours in LLMs via SAE-Based Representation Engineering
YuZhao, et al., Hongru WANG, Xuanli He, Kam-Fai Wong, Pasquale Minervini
Under Review
Self-DC: When to retrieve and When to generate? Self Divide-and-Conquer for ..
Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue, Baohang Zhou, et. al, Kam-fai Wong
Under Review
A Survey of the Evolution of Language Model-Based Dialogue Systems
Hongru Wang, Lingzhi Wang, Yiming Du, Liang Chen, Jingyan Zhou, Yufei Wang, Kam-Fai Wong
Under Review

Experience

Intern and Volunteer

2024.08 - Present

ByteDance Seed-LLM-Harizon (Doubao)
Research Intern

2020.08 - 2021.09

CUHK MoE Key Lab of High Confidence Software Technologies
Research Assistant

2019.04 - 2019.07

Kuaishou Music and Video Recommendation
Data Intern

Awards & Grants

Competitions, Scholarship

  • Reaching Out Award (2023-2024)
  • Overseas Research Attachment Programme (ORAP 2023-2024)
  • Technology and Business Development Fund (TBF22ENG004)
  • Top 1 at Online Safety Price organized by AI Singapore (WWW 2024)
  • Top 10 at ICLR 2021 Workshop MLPCP Track 1 (rank 7th)
  • Third Price at SMP2020-ECDT Few-shot Spoken Language Understanding
  • Distinguished Academic Performance Scholarship (2019-2020), CUHK CSE
  • Top 10 at SemEval2020-Task4: CommonSense Detection and Explanations
  • Meritorious Winner, Mathematical Contest In Modeling (2018)
  • A software copyright of “WeCampus WeChat mini-program” (2018SR562540)
  • Third Prize of Internet + College Students Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition China National Radio Scholarship

Services

Reviewers, Workshops

TA

Teaching Assistant, Student Helper

  • SEEM 3450 Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship
  • SEEM 3490 Information Systems Management
  • SEEM 5730 / ECLT 5910 Information Technology Management

Tools

Open Source Tools, just for fun

Contact

  • You can find me in wechat public account: 地球漫游必备手册 -> 慧用智能
  • hrwang@se.cuhk.edu.hk
  • Hong Kong, ShenZhen, Beijing, GuangZhou, HangZhou, Singapore, Bali