WING Events | Web IR NLP Group @ NUS

Yisong Miao Presents His Vector Institute Research Internship Work (with UBC NLP) at the NUS SRI Event

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On the afternoon of 2 July 2026, NUS SoC held the 2026 edition of its Summer Research Internship (SRI) Research Gathering and Networking Event. SRI is our school’s program for attracting talent from around the globe to conduct research at our school over the summer. Our group is delighted to host Mr. Thura Aung (KMITL) and Mr. Ha Minh Hieu (HUST) this summer. Dr. Anand Bhojan delivered the opening remarks, and Prof. Chan Mun Choon gave a keynote about SoC’s PhD program.

Yisong Miao, a PhD student from our group, was invited to give a 20-minute presentation at the gathering. He shared his experience as a Vector Institute research intern in 2025, under the supervision of Prof. Vered Shwartz and Prof. Jian Zhu (both from the NLP Group at the University of British Columbia). This is the most interdisciplinary research Yisong has done, connecting pragmatic speaker models (closely related to his PhD topic of discourse) with LLMs’ cultural competence, language grounding, and vision language models. The project examines whether LLMs can act as pragmatic speakers by adapting their responses to users’ cultural backgrounds in conversations grounded in images. The team built Cultural and Pragmatic Response Inference (CAPRI), a new dataset in which users provide cultural cues and ask questions requiring culturally appropriate answers. For example, “What is the temperature?” should be answered in °C or °F depending on the user’s cultural background. Extensive evaluations show that state-of-the-art models can largely infer the user’s cultural background, but often fail to apply this knowledge in their responses. Explicit reasoning about the user’s background, step by step, improves their responses, but can be costly in real-time conversation. The work will appear at EMNLP 2026.

Yisong felt especially honored to give the première présentation of this work at this event, as SRI brings together junior students from around the globe, including Brazil, France, and the USA (which are also represented in the CAPRI dataset!). The seminar concluded with a discussion about future work on extending the CAPRI dataset to more cultures in Southeast Asia (where many seminar audiences come from) and elsewhere around the world.

Prof. Vered Shwartz said: “I’m really excited about this benchmark. Most of the existing work in cultural competence focuses on testing LLMs on their cultural knowledge. Our benchmark allows us to test whether LLMs can also recognize cultural context and apply this knowledge in context. I hope our work will inform future model design. At a personal level, it was a pleasure working with Yisong and Jian on this project. Yisong was always so methodological, organized, and energetic, even though our virtual meetings were happening at 1 am Singapore time. I hope to meet him in person soon!”

Links: Earlier news featuring Yisong as a Vector Institute research intern; The project indexed at our website.

Below is a gallery of the seminar photo

Yisong with the 2026 cohort of NUS SRI interns after the seminar:

Yuxi Xie Defends Her Ph.D. Thesis on Closed-Loop Scaling

Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Congratulations to Yuxi Xie on successfully defending her Ph.D. thesis, “Closed Loop Scaling: Autonomous Improvement of LLM and VLM Reasoning”, from WING!

We wish her every success as she moves into her next chapter.

Many thanks to her committee members, Zhiyong Huang, Anthony K. H. Tung, and See-Kiong Ng, and to her many collaborators, including Michael Shieh, Junxian He, and Kenji Kawaguchi.

Special thanks as well to Prof. William Wang for hosting Yuxi at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Lyle Ungar Visits WING to Give Invited NAII Seminar on Evaluating LLMs for Cross-Cultural Coaching and Therapy

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 11:00:00 +0800

Did you miss Lyle Ungar’s NUS AI Institute seminar on evaluating large language models for cross-cultural coaching and therapy?

Watch the recording to learn how frontier LLMs still struggle with culturally appropriate conversation and what can be done about it.

Lyle Ungar (University of Pennsylvania) explores how to evaluate LLMs on subjective tasks like coaching and therapy across cultures. The talk highlights:

An interpretable framework for comparing linguistic politeness cues across languages
Evidence that LLMs can homogenize non-Western styles toward stylistic neutrality, a failure missed by standard metrics
RASTA, a retrieval-based method that preserves culturally appropriate style without hurting content
The Culturally-Aware Conversations benchmark

Lyle Ungar is Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with cross-appointments in Psychology, Bioengineering, Genomics & Computational Biology, and Operations, Information & Decisions. His group builds explainable NLP and socio-emotionally sensitive AI for psychological and medical research.

This NUS AI Institute seminar was recorded and rebroadcast with explicit permission from Lyle Ungar.

Recording: Watch the seminar

Philipp Mayr Visits WING: AI Overload and Scholarly Document Processing

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We were delighted to host Philipp Mayr (GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) at our group meeting on February 20, 2026. He introduced the Knowledge Technologies department, the Information and Data Retrieval team, the OMINO project, and two Scholarly Document Processing projects.

One highlight was the recent paper “AI Overload: A Multi-Level Taxonomy and the Path Forward” (IEEE Intelligent Systems, 2026), which defines AI overload as a sustained mismatch between AI-amplified demands and human or institutional capacity for supervision and validation.

The talk discussed AI overload across individuals (cognitive strain), organizations (coordination burden), and societies (polarization), and examined overload patterns such as cognitive, informational, coordination, monitoring/control, normative, and affective burdens.

A key insight was that in modern AI systems, the bottleneck is no longer generation, but oversight. As AI autonomy grows, validation, monitoring, and accountability demands increase. Mitigation therefore requires bounded autonomy, calibrated reliance, governance mechanisms, and stronger AI literacy.

Paper: AI Overload: A Multi-Level Taxonomy and the Path Forward

We thank Philipp for the inspiring and thought-provoking talk!

Below is a gallery of the seminar, photo credit to Sahaj!

Michalis Vlachos Presents at the CSSH Seminar: Searching Digital Libraries with Language Models

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our group is delighted to have Michalis Vlachos visiting our group as a Sabbatical Visiting Professor. On January 28th, 2026, Michalis presented his work on “Searching Digital Libraries with Language Models” at a seminar hosted by the Centre for Computational Social Science and Humanities (CSSH) at NUS.

Abstract:

Digital libraries now hold tens of millions of pages, yet most are still accessed through keyword based search over potentially noisy OCR text. As collections expand, traditional search interfaces struggle to support meaningful discovery, context, and evidence-based answers.

This talk explores how modern language models can enhance the entire digital library pipeline. We examine how LLMs can refine OCR output, clean historical text, and enable natural-language search through retrieval augmented generation. Using real-world archival data, we show improvements in character and word error rates, as well as downstream gains in retrieval quality, evaluated through both standard metrics and LLM based judging for faithfulness, correctness, and relevancy.

We also look beyond ranking results, discussing evidence driven answers and immersive, augmented-reality interfaces that open new ways to explore large historical collections. We conclude by reflecting on how these advances can improve transparency, reduce misinformation, and reshape the future of search in digital libraries.

Below is a gallery of the seminar, photo credit to Min and Yisong!

WING 2026 Spring Outing at Clarke Quay

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

WING members were excited to have a spring outing at Clarke Quay on January 23, 2026. For this outing, we scheduled it at the beginning of the semester to help new members better cohere with the group.

We enjoyed both the beautiful river view and the pizza! We were happy to see the return of our alumni, especially Hengchang, Victor, and Taha, as well as our collaborator, Yunshan. We especially thank Hengchang (a WING PhD alumnus) for his generous donation of the pizza (and other items on the bill as well)!

Below is a gallery of the outing, photo credit to Yajing, Glenda, and Yisong!

WING Hosts a Lab Tour for AAAI 2026 Participants

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AAAI 2026 has been held in Singapore from January 20 to January 27. Some of our group members are excited to travel to the conference site (at Expo) to communicate research. In conjunction with our regular group meeting on Friday, January 23, we are delighted to invite AAAI participants to visit our WING lab and experience the NUS Computing environment.

With our visitors, this group meeting had a special agenda:

Minzhi Li from WING NUS gave a presentation to debrief her 2025 internship experience.

Dr. Lu Gan (from GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) gave a presentation about an AAAI paper from their team, titled “GSAP-ERE: Fine-Grained Scholarly Entity and Relation Extraction Focused on Machine Learning” (available here).

Finally, we had a round of self-introductions for all WING members as well as the visitors to socialize and discuss research.

Below is a gallery of the lab tour, photo credit to Sahaj, Yisong, and Min!

SSNLP 2026: WING Members Present Three Posters

Wed, 21 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Singapore Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SSNLP) returns on Wednesday, January 21, 2026, at SUTD as a full-day, in-person event. Since 2018, SSNLP has been the annual gathering of Singapore’s NLP community, bringing together students, faculty, and industry researchers to share ongoing work and spark collaboration. Held in conjunction with AAAI 2026, this year’s symposium will feature invited keynotes from leading researchers in the field, a panel discussion, and an immersive poster-focused program showcasing recent work from Singapore-based researchers published in top venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICLR, and AAAI this year (this short intro is propagated from SSNLP 2026 website).

WING members are delighted to attend the seminar, enjoying keynote talks from guest researchers who travel all the way from AoE to Singapore. We also appreciate the panel discussions led by PC Chairs (from *ACL, ICLR, and NeurIPS conference), who share valuable insights on the peer review process, particularly from the students’ perspective.

We also engage in the immersive poster program, and our group is excited to present three posters:

Discursive Circuits: How Do Language Models Understand Discourse Relations? by Yisong Miao and Min-Yen Kan (EMNLP 2025)
SkyLadder: Better and Faster Pretraining via Context Window Scheduling by Tongyao Zhu, Qian Liu, Haonan Wang, Shiqi Chen, Xiangming Gu, Tianyu Pang, and Min-Yen Kan (NeurIPS 2025)
Drifting Away from Truth: GenAI-Driven News Diversity Challenges LVLM-Based Misinformation Detection by Fanxiao Li, Jiaying Wu, Tingchao Fu, Yunyun Dong, Bingbing Song and Wei Zhou (AAAI 2026).

We thank the symposium organizers for the opportunity to present our work, as well as the enthusiastic audience who engaged with us during the poster sessions!

Below is a gallery of the poster presentations, we thank Prof Min for taking these photos!

Yisong presenting his work on “Discursive Circuits: How Do Language Models Understand Discourse Relations?”:

Tongyao presenting his work on “SkyLadder: Better and Faster Pretraining via Context Window Scheduling”:

Fanxiao presenting his work on “Drifting Away from Truth: GenAI-Driven News Diversity Challenges LVLM-Based Misinformation Detection”:

WING Members Present at NUS AI Seminar at the Computer Science Department

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NUS AI Seminar at the Computer Science Department is a new initiative to bring together AI researchers to share their latest research findings and insights. There are eight speakers in the Fall 2025 semester, usually hosted on Wednesday afternoons at Seminar Room 21. WING members are excited to present their research alongside other presenters from NUS Computing, MIT, and UCLA. We appreciate Prof. Lee Wee Sun and PhD student Guoji Fu for hosting the seminar.

Yisong Miao gave a seminar presentation titled “Faithfulness and Interpretability for Discourse Understanding” on November 19th, 2025. This talk combines his work on Discursive Socratic Questioning (ACL 2024) and Discursive Circuits (EMNLP 2025). He explained how our team tackles the technical challenge of evaluating a model’s discourse faithfulness and formalizing a unique setup for transformer circuit discovery. The seminar ends with an audience discussion on the conceptual difference between truthfulness and faithfulness, as well as designing new methods using sparse circuits in future work.

Yajing Yang presented “From Data to Insights: LLMs for Financial Narration”, also on November 19th, 2025, highlighting her research on financial data narration. Drawing from DataTales: A Benchmark for Real-World Intelligent Data Narration (EMNLP 2024) and KAHAN: Knowledge-Augmented Hierarchical Analysis and Narration for Financial Data Narration (EMNLP 2025), she described our team’s efforts to build a realistic benchmark and improve generation quality through knowledge integration and hierarchical analysis. The talk sparked discussion on remaining challenges in financial report generation and how LLMs could be used to produce more actionable and informative insights.

On December 3rd, 2025, Xuan Long Do delivered a seminar titled “Toward Autonomous Self-Improving Foundation Models”. The presentation spanned multiple projects, including “What Makes a Good Natural Language Prompt?” (ACL 2025), Multi-Expert Prompting (EMNLP 2024), and VISTA, his 2025 Google internship project on a self-improving video generation agent. Beginning with an analysis of prompt and model fragility, he showed how multi-agent reasoning can help address these limitations before moving toward the broader vision of autonomous self-improving foundation models. The seminar concluded with an audience discussion on future research directions in this area.

Below is a gallery of the seminar photos, some of which are enhanced and regenerated via Google’s Nano Banana

Yisong Miao presenting his work on “Faithfulness and Interpretability for Discourse Understanding” at the AI Seminar on November 19th, 2025:

Yajing Yang presenting her work on “From Data to Insights: LLMs for Financial Narration” at the AI Seminar on November 19th, 2025:

Xuan Long Do presenting his work on “Toward Autonomous Self-Improving Foundation Models” at the AI Seminar on December 3rd, 2025:

WING Members Present at NUS Computing's Inaugural AI-X: Industry Day

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A gallery of additional photos from the event is included below, with thanks to the official event photographer.

WING Members Enjoy the Group Outing at the Macritchie Reservoir

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A gallery of additional photos of the outing is included below.

CS6101 T2510 - Retrieval Augmented Generation

Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Navigating Ethical Challenges in NLP: Hands-on strategies for students and researchers (Tutorial at ACL '25)

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Min's invited talk on prompting at the the IT:U Austria Summer School

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Check out Min’s talk that makes an analogy to the boy who harnessed the wind with LLM prompting:

Pictures of the NLP Summer School

(Courtesy the IT:U Austria staff. Pictures cleared by the participants with informed consent.)

iGyro Symposium on Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information (iGYRO SMDM 2025)

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Reasoning and Planning for Large Language Models

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

SSNLP '25

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

SSNLP '24

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

WING Members Enjoy the Group Outing at Yajing's Condo for a BBQ

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A gallery of additional photos of the outing is included below.

SSNLP '23

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

CS6101 2310 - Large Language Models

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

SSNLP '22

Fri, 13 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

CS6101 2020 - Conversational Recommendation Systems

Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

CS6101 2010 - Advanced General NLP II

Thu, 06 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

CS6101 1920 - Advanced General NLP I

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000