Yifan Wang
About Me
Hi! I'm Yifan Wang, a second year PhD student as a member of RTG: Neuroexplicit models of language, vision and action project at Saarland University. Currently I'm co-supervised by Prof. Dr. Vera Demberg and Prof. Dr. Isabel Valera. Prior to this, I obtained my Master degree in Language Science and Technology at Saarland University and Bachelor degree in Germanistics at Shanghai Jiaotong University. I have also spent an exchange semester at Heidelberg Univeristy in 2018/19.
My current research focuses on identifying and addressing undesired behaviors in NLP systems, with a particular interest in detecting and mitigating social biases in LLMs. I'm also passionate about improving the interpretability of deep neural networks. Additionally, I'm exploring new research directions that are both interesting and meaningful for the future of AI development.
In my free time, I enjoy walking around in the city. As probably the worst cook in Germany, I'm always willing to join a food adventure (check out some failed fried eggs here).
For further information, welcome to have a look at my CV.
Publications
- Yifan Wang, Vera Demberg. RSA-Control: A Pragmatics-Grounded Lightweight Controllable Text Generation Framework. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). [paper]
- Dongqi Liu, Yifan Wang, Vera Demberg. Incorporating Distributions of Discourse Structure for Long Document Abstractive Summarization. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2023). [paper]
- Dongqi Liu, Yifan Wang, Jia Loy, Vera Demberg. SciNews: From Scholarly Complexities to Public Narratives--A Dataset for Scientific News Report Generation. Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING), 2024. [paper]
- Yifan Wang, Vera Demberg. A Parameter-Efficient Multi-Objective Approach to Mitigate Stereotypical Bias in Language Models. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP). [paper]
- Yifan Wang, Sukrut Rao, Ji-Ung Lee, Mayank Jobanputra, Vera Demberg. B-cos LM: Efficiently Transforming Pre-trained Language Models for Improved Explainability. Preprint, 2025. [paper]
Work Experiences
- 2022.11-2023.8: Research Assistant, Saarland University
- Worked with Dongqi Liu on incorporating discourse structure to automatic summarization, faithfulness evaluation and relevant domains.
- Duties mainly include literature search, implementation of benchmarks and evaluation and analyses of model performance.
Research Projects
- Unsupervised Cantonese-Mandarin Machine Translation.[Code][Report], 2022.4-2022.10
- Leveraging Explanations for Improving In-Context Learning in Commonsense Reasoning Tasks.[Report], 2022.11-2023.4
- End-to-end Continuous Sign Language Recognition with Visual Alignment Constraint.[Code], 2022.4-2022.10
Contact
- Phone: (+49) 15227932317
- Email: