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Guanhua CHEN

Tenure-track Assistant Professor in SUSTech

Biography

Here is Guanhua Chen (陈冠华). I am a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science in Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech). I received Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science, The University of Hong Kong in 2022, under the supervision of Prof. Jia Pan and Prof. Wenping Wang. I obtained the Bachelor and Master degree from Tsinghua University in 2012 and 2014, respectively. I was a research intern in Microsoft Research Asia and Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab. Currently, I am an area chair of ACL, EMNLP and CCL, also the reviewer for top AI conferences and journal like ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, and TASLP. I was awarded as Microsoft Research Asia StarTrack Scholar in 2025. My research interests are natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs), especially reasoning LLMs, multimodal LLMs, agentic RL and LLM for low-resource applications like health and engineering, etc.


Positions available: I am looking for self-motivated PostDoc/PhD/Master/visiting students to join our lab. If you are interested, please send me an email with your CV. For your reference, here are the latest information of the PhD and Master application process of this year. Currently, we have 16 RTX 4090 GPUs (24GB), 16 NVIDIA L40 GPUs (48GB), and 4 A100 GPUs (40GB) available for students. Enough APIs of open-sourced/proprietary LLMs are also provided for students.

Selected Publications

* denotes corresponding author)

  • InfoScan: Information-Efficient Visual Scanning via Resource-Adaptive Walks

    • Yifeng Wu, S. Zhou, H. Huang, Y. Huang, H. Zheng, Y. Chen, Xian Wu, Ruize Han*, Guanhua Chen*
    • In Proceedings of ICLR 2026 [openreview]
  • Anchored Supervised Fine-Tuning

    • He Zhu, Junyou Su, Peng Lai, Ren Ma, Wenjia Zhang, Linyi Yang, Guanhua Chen*
    • In Proceedings of ICLR 2026 [openreview]
  • BiasScope: Towards Automated Detection of Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

    • Peng Lai, Zhihao Ou, Yong Wang, Longyue Wang, Jian Yang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen*
    • In Proceedings of ICLR 2026 [openreview]
  • Compound-QA: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Compound Questions

    • Yutao Hou, Yajing Luo, Zhiwen Ruan, Hongru Wang, Weifeng Ge, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen*.
    • In Proceedings of ICASSP 2026 (CCF B) [arxiv]
  • Enhancing Uncertainty Estimation in LLMs with Expectation of Aggregated Internal Belief

    • Zeguan Xiao, Diyang Dou, Boya Xiong, Yun Chen*, Guanhua Chen*.
    • In Proceedings of AAAI 2026 (CCF A, poster) [arxiv]
  • Beyond the Surface: Enhancing LLM-as-a-Judge Alignment with Human via Internal Representations

    • Peng Lai, Jianjie Zheng, Sijie Cheng, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen*.
    • In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2025 (CCF A, poster) [paper] [code]
  • G2: Guided Generation for Enhanced Output Diversity in LLMs

    • Zhiwen Ruan, Yixia Li, Yefeng Liu, Yun Chen, Weihua Luo, Peng Li, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen*.
    • In Proceedings of EMNLP 2025 (CCF B, long paper in main conference) [paper] [code]
  • Pi-SQL: Enhancing Text-to-SQL with Fine-Grained Guidance from Pivot Programming Languages

    • Yongdong Chi, Hanqing Wang, Yun Chen, Yan Yang, Jian Yang, Zonghan Yang, Xiao Yan, Guanhua Chen*.
    • In Findings of EMNLP 2025 (long paper) [paper] [code]
  • ImPart: Importance-Aware Delta-Sparsification for Improved Model Compression and Merging in LLMs

    • Yan Yang, Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Xuetao Wei, James Jianqiao Yu, Yun Chen*, Guanhua Chen*.
    • In Proceedings of ACL 2025 (CCF A, long paper in main conference) [pdf] [code]
  • PlanGPT: Enhancing Urban Planning with Tailored Language Model and Efficient Retrieval

    • He Zhu, Guanhua Chen*,Wenjia Zhang*.
    • In Proceedings of ACL 2025 (industry track) (CCF A, oral, long paper) [pdf]
  • Fanno: Augmenting High-Quality Instruction Data with Open-Sourced LLMs Only

    • He Zhu, Yifan Ding, Yicheng Tao, Zhiwen Ruan, Yixia Li, Wenjia Zhang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen*.
    • In Findings of ACL 2025 (long paper) [pdf] [code]
  • Tag-Instruct: Controlled Instruction Complexity Enhancement through Structure-based Augmentation

    • He Zhu, Zhiwen Ruan, Junyou Su, Xingwei He, Yun Chen, Wenjia Zhang*, Guanhua Chen*.
    • In Findings of ACL 2025 (long paper) [pdf] [code]
  • MiLoRA: Harnessing Minor Singular Components for Parameter-Efficient LLM Finetuning

    • Hanqing Wang, Yixia Li, Shuo Wang, Guanhua Chen*, Yun Chen*.
    • In Proceedings of NAACL 2025 (CCF B, long paper in main conference) [pdf] [code]
  • SeqAR: Jailbreak LLMs with Sequential Auto-Generated Characters

    • Yan Yang, Zeguan Xiao, Xin Lu, Hongru Wang, Xuetao Wei, Hailiang Huang, Guanhua Chen*, Yun Chen*.
    • In Proceedings of NAACL 2025 (CCF B, long paper in main conference) [pdf] [code]
  • Self-DC: When to Reason and When to Act? Self Divide-and-Conquer for Compositional Unknown Questions

    • Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue, Baohang Zhou, Tianhua Zhang, Cunxiang Wang, Huimin Wang, Guanhua Chen*, Kam-Fai Wong*
    • In Proceedings of NAACL 2025 (CCF B, long paper in main conference) [pdf]
  • LayAlign: Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning in LLMs via Layer-Wise Adaptive Fusion and Alignment Strategy

    • Zhiwen Ruan, Yixia Li, He Zhu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen*.
    • In Findings of NAACL 2025 (long paper) [pdf] [code]
  • SeTAR: Out-of-Distribution Detection with Selective Low-Rank Approximation

    • Yixia Li, Boya Xiong, Guanhua Chen*, Yun Chen*
    • In Proceedings of NeurIPS 2024 (CCF A, long paper) [pdf] [code]
  • Distract Large Language Models for Automatic Jailbreak Attack

    • Zeguan Xiao, Yan Yang, Guanhua Chen*, Yun Chen*
    • In Proceedings of EMNLP 2024 (CCF B, long paper in main conference) [pdf]
  • PACIT: Unlocking the Power of Examples for Better In-Context Instruction Tuning

    • Tianci Xue, Ziqi Wang, Yixia Li, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen*
    • In Findings of ACL 2024 (long paper) [pdf] [code]
  • mCLIP: Multilingual CLIP via Cross-lingual Transfer

    • Guanhua Chen, Lu Hou, Yun Chen, Wenliang Dai, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu, Jia Pan, Wenping Wang
    • In Proceedings of ACL 2023 (CCF A, long paper in main conference, oral) [pdf] [code]
  • XLM-D: Decorate Cross-lingual Pre-training Model as Non-Autoregressive Neural Machine Translation

    • Yong Wang, Shilin He, Guanhua Chen*, Yun Chen, Daxin Jiang*.
    • In Proceedings of EMNLP 2022 (CCF B, long paper in main conference) [pdf]
  • Multilingual Sentence Transformer as A Multilingual Word Aligner

    • Weikang Wang, Guanhua Chen, Hanqing Wang, Yue Han, Yun Chen.
    • In Findings of EMNLP 2022 (CCF B, short paper) [pdf] [code]
  • Towards Making the Most of Cross-Lingual Transfer for Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation

    • Guanhua Chen, Shuming Ma, Yun Chen, Dongdong Zhang, Jia Pan, Wenping Wang, Furu Wei
    • In Proceedings of ACL 2022 (CCF A, long paper in main conference) [pdf] [code]
  • Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer of Neural Machine Translation with Multilingual Pretrained Encoders

    • Guanhua Chen, Shuming Ma, Yun Chen, Li Dong, Dongdong Zhang, Jia Pan, Wenping Wang, Furu Wei
    • In Proceedings of EMNLP 2021 (CCF B, long paper in main conference, oral) [pdf] [code]
  • Lexically Constrained Neural Machine Translation with Explicit Alignment Guidance

    • Guanhua Chen, Yun Chen, Victor O.K. Li
    • In Proceedings of AAAI 2021 (CCF A, long paper) [pdf] [code]
  • Lexical-Constraint-Aware Neural Machine Translation via Data Augmentation

    • Guanhua Chen, Yun Chen, Yong Wang, Victor O.K. Li
    • In Proceedings of IJCAI 2020 (CCF A, long paper) [pdf] [code]

Co-Authored Publications

  • Tree Search for LLM Agent Reinforcement Learning [ICLR’26]

  • VisCodex: Unified Multimodal Code Generation via Merging Vision and Coding Models [ICLR’26]

  • Fair Decision Utility in Human-AI Collaboration: Interpretable Confidence Adjustment for Humans with Cognitive Disparities [ICLR’26]

  • From Abstract to Contextual: What LLMs Still Cannot Do in Mathematics [ICLR’26]

  • Synthesizing Multimodal Verifiable Game Data to Boost VLMs’ General Reasoning [ICLR’26]

  • ConInstruct: Evaluating Large Language Models on Conflict Detection and Resolution in Instructions [AAAI’26]

  • Alleviating Hallucinations in Large Language Models through Multi-Model Contrastive Decoding and Dynamic Hallucination Detection [NeurIPS’25]

  • PlanGPT-VL: Enhancing Urban Planning with Domain-Specific Vision-Language Models [EMNLP’25]

  • A Joint Learning of Force Feedback of Robotic Manipulation and Textual Cues for Granular Materials Classification [RAL’25]

  • LLMs Trust Humans More, That’s a Problem! Unveiling and Mitigating the Authority Bias in Retrieval-Augmented Generation [ACL’25]

  • The Elephant in the Room: Exploring the Role of Neutral Words in Language Model Group-Agnostic Debiasing [ACL’25 Findings]

  • Understanding Particles from Video: Property Estimation of Granular Materials via Visuo-Haptic Learning [RAL’25]

  • StyleBART: Decorate Pretrained Model with Style Adapters for Unsupervised Stylistic Headline Generation [EMNLP’23 Findings]

  • Evaluating Explanation Methods for Vision-and-Language Navigation [ECAI’23]

  • Accurate Word Alignment Induction from Neural Machine Translation [EMNLP’20]

Working Papers

(all are corresponding authored papers)

  • From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models?

  • SPPO: Sequence-Level PPO for Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks

  • InstructDiff: Domain-Adaptive Data Selection via Differential Entropy for Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

  • StatABench: Dataset and Framework for Evaluating Statistical Analysis Capabilities of LLMs

  • Beyond Static Rules: Automated Discovery of Latent Vulnerabilities in Text-to-SQL

  • BAM-MT: Batch-Adaptive Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Medical Machine Translation

  • Representation-Guided Parameter-Efficient LLM Unlearning

  • VFA: Empoweing Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation

  • FinSafetyBench: Evaluating LLM Safety in Real-World Financial Scenarios

  • GIFT: Guided Fine-Tuning and Transfer for Enhancing Instruction-Tuned Language Models

  • AlignDiff: Exploiting Model-Intrinsic Information for Better Preference Data Selection

  • Enhancing Large Language Model Reasoning via Selective Critical Token Fine-Tuning

  • Evaluating Memory Capability in Continuous Lifelog Scenario

  • Unveiling Over-Memorization in Finetuning LLMs for Reasoning Tasks

  • Enhancing Delta Compression in LLMs via SVD-based Quantization Error Minimization

  • Automatic Robustness Stress Testing of LLMs as Mathematical Problem Solvers

  • Towards Bridging the Reward-Generation Gap in Direct Alignment Algorithms

Teaching

  • Undergraduate course STA323: Big Data Analysis Software and Application (Hadoop or Spark)
  • Graduate course STA5007: Advanced Natural Language Processing

Group Members

  • PhD candidates: Peng Lai(2026), Yunpeng Sun(SLAI,2025), Zhiwen Ruan(2024), Yixia Li(2023)
  • Master students: Xuanzhe Xu(2026), Qianyu Yang(2026), Qi Wang(2025), Youxin Zhu(2025), Xiaodong Lao(2024), Jianjie Zheng(2024)

(Last updated on Jan. 27, 2026)