I have been a faculty member at Shanghai Jiao Tong University since 2021. From 2016 to 2020, I worked as a researcher at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan, following an internship there in 2013. I am deeply grateful to my senseis at NICT—Dr. Masao Utiyama and Dr. Eiichiro Sumita—for their invaluable guidance, support, and inspiration throughout my time in Japan. From 2012 to 2016, I pursued a joint Ph.D. between Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), under the supervision of Prof. Bao-Liang Lu, Prof. Hai Zhao, and Prof. Sabine Ploux. Prior to my doctoral studies, I studied and worked at the Xinjiang Branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences from 2009 to 2012. I earned my bachelor's degree from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2009. I was born in Harbin, China, in 1985—the city I proudly call home.
Language Intelligence is a form of cognitive capability—shared by humans and increasingly emulated by machines—that enables agents to learn about the external world through natural language, construct highly abstract linguistic representations, and thereby understand, refine, and creatively transform that world. Our research seeks to explore and expand the frontiers of this intelligence across three interconnected domains:
★ Language Modeling: The mechanism and application.
•We have observed some interesting phenomena: [Overthinking], [Chain-of-Embedding], etc.
•We have proposed [DeepMath-103K] with Tencent and [PolyMath] with Qwen Team.
★ Computational Linguistics: An interdisciplinary field of computer science, linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, etc.
• We have provided the first evidence that [Neural Theory-of-Mind Networks] can spontaneously generalize high-order ToM, akin to human cognition.
• We have observed that LLM can solve concrete problems through [Meta-Reasoning].
★ Machine Translation: I worked on it for over ten years and will never give it up.
• We argue that the development trend of machine translation is gradually moving toward [Unsupervised Machine Translation].
• We are working on [Human-like Machine Translation].
Language Intelligence Lab (Previously MT Lab)
I have always been fortunate to work with these brilliant young researchers:
@SJTU
Ph.D. Students:
Xiao Wang (2026-; Co-supervised with Prof. Jianfeng Xu)
Junxuan He (2026-; Co-supervised with Prof. Jianfeng Xu)
Qingyuan Tian (2024-)
Lizhen Xu (2023-)
Yang Han (2023-)
Yiming Wang (2023-)
Ziyin Zhang (2023-)
Wenhong Zhu (2022-2025)
Xingyu Chen (2022-)
Zhiwei He (2021-)
Master Students:
2025-:
Haoxiang Sun
Yaoyao Wang
Tianyi Liang
2024-:
Haonan Zang
Jianing Guo
2023-:
Xiaofeng Wang
2022-:
Hongkun Hao (-->Alibaba DAMO Academy)
Yiming Ai (-->China Merchants Bank)
Tianxiang Hu (-->The Pudong Government)
Tian Xia (-->Kuaishou Technology)
2021-:
Ruize Gao (-->Alibaba DAMO Academy)
Undergraduate Students:
-2025: Haoxiang Sun, Yaoyao Wang, Tianyi Liang (All-->Master Student, SJTU), and Binlin Zhou (-->Ph.D. student, PSU )
-2024: Chenxi Yang (-->Master Student, SJTU)
-2023: Ziyin Zhang and Xiaofeng Wang (ALL-->Master Student, SJTU)
-2022: Yushen Chen, Hongkun Hao, Yiming Ai, and Tianxiang Hu (ALL-->Master Student, SJTU)
-2021: Xiaoyi Bao (-->Microsoft), Ruiyi Wang (-->Master Student, CMU)
CS3966: Natural Language Processing and Large Language Model (for the John Class), 2024-
CS3602: Natural Language Processing (for the CS and AI major), 2021-
CS438: Information Extraction, 2021-2023
CS247: Data Mining, 2021-2022
