About Me

I am a second-year Ph.D. student at NAIST, advised by Prof. Taro Watanabe. During the Master and Ph.D. period at NAIST, I had wonderful internships at Cohere RAG, Apple Siri, and Amazon Translate teams. Before joining NAIST, I worked at Tencent AI Lab as a full-time researcher, mentored by Dr. Lemao Liu and Guoping Huang. I am proud that we released the API of the first Interactive Machine Translation (IMT) in China, namely TranSmart. I got my bachelor degree from Central China Normal University, advised by Prof. Qingxing Dong.

My Research Objective

Designing AI systems with stronger interpretability and extensibility.

Publications

(*: equal contribution, Topics:)

Preprint

• Huayang Li, Yahui Liu, Hongyu Sun, Deng Cai, Leyang Cui, Wei Bi, Peilin Zhao, Taro Watanabe. SeqPE: Transformer with Sequential Position Encoding. arXiv 2025.

• Huayang Li, Pat Verga, Priyanka Sen, Bowen Yang, Vijay Viswanathan, Patrick Lewis, Taro Watanabe, Yixuan Su. ALR^2: A Retrieve-then-Reason Framework for Long-context Question Answering. arXiv 2024.

• Shuming Shi, Enbo Zhao, Deng Cai, Leyang Cui, Xinting Huang, Huayang Li. Inferflow: an Efficient and Highly Configurable Inference Engine for Large Language Models. arXiv 2024.

• Deng Cai, Huayang Li, Tingchen Fu, Siheng Li, Weiwen Xu, Shuaiyi Li, Bowen Cao, Zhisong Zhang, Xinting Huang, Leyang Cui, Yan Wang, Lemao Liu, Taro Watanabe, Shuming Shi. On the Transformations across Reward Model, Parameter Update, and In-Context Prompt. arXiv 2024.

• Huayang Li*, Yixuan Su*, Deng Cai*, Yan Wang*, Lemao Liu*. A Survey on Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation. arXiv 2022.

• Guoping Huang, Lemao Liu, Xing Wang, Longyue Wang, Huayang Li, Zhaopeng Tu, Chengyan Huang, Shuming Shi. TranSmart: A Practical Interactive Machine Translation System. arXiv 2021.

Conference

• Huayang Li, Deng Cai, Zhi Qu, Qu Cui, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Lemao Liu, Taro Watanabe. Cross-lingual Contextualized Phrase Retrieval. Findings of EMNLP 2024.

• Haoran Yang, Deng Cai, Huayang Li, Wei Bi, Wai Lam, Shuming Shi. A Frustratingly Simple Decoding Method for Neural Text Generation. COLING 2024.

• Huayang Li, Tian Lan, Zihao Fu, Deng Cai, Lemao Liu, Nigel Collier, Taro Watanabe, Yixuan Su. Repetition In Repetition Out: Towards Understanding Neural Text Degeneration from the Data Perspective. NeurIPS 2023. 

• Huayang Li*, Siheng Li*, Deng Cai*, Longyue Wang, Lemao Liu, Taro Watanabe, Yujiu Yang, Shuming Shi. TextBind: Multi-turn Interleaved Multimodal Instruction-following in the Wild. Findings of ACL 2024.

• Yixuan Su, Tian Lan, Huayang Li, Jialu Xu, Yan Wang, Deng Cai. Pandagpt: One model to instruction-follow them all. TLLM 2023

• Jin Xu, Xiaojiang Liu, Jianhao Yan, Deng Cai, Huayang Li, Jian Li. Learning to Break the Loop: Analyzing and Mitigating Repetitions for Neural Text Generation. NeurIPS 2022.

• Huayang Li, Deng Cai, Jin Xu, Taro Watanabe. Residual Learning of Neural Text Generation with n-gram Language Model. Findings of EMNLP 2022.

• Wei Bi*, Huayang Li*, Jiacheng Huang. Data Augmentation for Text Generation Without Any Augmented Data. ACL 2021.

• Jiannan Xiang, Yahui Liu, Deng Cai, Huayang Li, Defu Lian, and Lemao Liu. Assessing Dialogue Systems with Distribution Distances. Findings of ACL 2021.

• Jiannan Xiang*, Huayang Li*, Defu Lian, Guoping Huang, Taro Watanabe, Lemao Liu. Visualizing the Relationship Between Encoded Linguistic Information and Task Performance. Findings of ACL 2022. 

• Jiannan Xiang, Huayang Li, Yahui Liu, Lemao Liu, Guoping Huang, Defu Lian, Shuming Shi. Investigating Data Variance in Evaluations of Automatic Machine Translation Metrics. Findings of ACL 2022.

• Huayang Li, Lemao Liu, Guoping Huang, Shuming Shi. GWLAN: General Word-Level Autocompletion for Computer-Aided Translation. ACL 2021.

• Deng Cai, Yan Wang, Huayang Li, Wai Lam, and Lemao Liu. Neural Machine Translation with Monolingual Translation Memory. Outstanding Paper Award of ACL 2021.

• Huayang Li, Lemao Liu, Guoping Huang, Shuming Shi. On the Branching Bias of Syntax Extracted from Pre-trained Language Models. Findings of EMNLP 2020.

• Jierui Li, Lemao Liu, Huayang Li, Guanlin Li, Guoping Huang and Shuming Shi. Evaluating Explanation Methods for Neural Machine Translation. ACL 2020.

• Tianxiang Zhao, Lemao Liu, Guoping Huang, Huayang Li, Yingling Liu, Guiquan Liu, Shuming Shi. Balancing Quality and Human Involvement: An Effective Approach to Interactive Neural Machine Translation. AAAI 2020.

• Yahui Liu, Marco De Nadai, Deng Cai, Huayang Li, Xavier Alameda-Pineda, Nicu Sebe, Bruno Lepri. Describe What to Change: A Text-guided Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Approach. ACMM 2020.

Journal

• Huayang Li, Guoping Huang, Deng Cai, Lemao Liu. Neural Machine Translation with Noisy Lexical Constraints. IEEE/ACM TASLP.

Selected Awards & Honors

• Special Researcher, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS, 日本学術振興会), 2023

• Outstanding Paper Award of ACL, 2021

Education

• Apr. 2023 - Present: Ph.D., Division of Information Science,  Nara Institute of Science and Technology

• Apr. 2021 - Mar. 2023: M.E., Division of Information Science,  Nara Institute of Science and Technology

• Sep. 2014 - Jun. 2018: B.E., Dept. of Computer Science, Central China Normal University

Research Experience

• Jun. 2025 - Present 2025: Research Intern, SakanaAI, with Richard Sproat and Tianyu Zhao

• May 2024 - Aug. 2024: Intern of Technical Staff, Cohere RAG team, with Yixuan Su, Pat Verga, and Patrick Lewis.

• Jun. 2022 - Oct. 2022: Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon Translate, with Maria Nadejde, Xing Niu, Stanislas Lauly, and Yogarshi Vyas.

• Oct. 2021 - Jun. 2022: Research Intern, Apple Siri, with Xiaojiang Liu

• Jul. 2018 - Apr. 2021: Researcher, Tencent AI Lab, with Guoping Huang and Lemao Liu.

Credit to my sister for designing the logo of this site 😎