About me

I am a Ph.D. candidate at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, advised by Prof. Kam-Fai Wong. I was a visiting researcher at LMU Munich, working with Prof. Hinrich Schütze. I received my M.S. from Peking University and B.S. from Northwestern Polytechnical University.

I develop post-training methods for large language models, with the goal of making them both more capable and more reliable. My recent work focuses on reinforcement learning for LLM reasoning [EEPO, BRIDGE] and robust finetuning [PEARL, VAA], building on earlier work on evaluating and watermarking LLM-generated content [CONNER, WatME].

News

• [01/2026] Our paper on exploration dynamics in RL is accepted at ICLR 2026.
• [05/2025] Our paper on safety alignment is accepted at ICML 2025.
• [02/2025] Our paper on instruction tuning is accepted at ICLR 2025.
• [05/2024] Our paper on LLM watermarking is accepted at ACL 2024.
• [10/2023] Our paper on LLM evaluation is accepted at EMNLP 2023.

Publications (Full List)

• Liang Chen, Xueting Han, Li Shen, Jing Bai, Kam-Fai Wong.
  Beyond Two-Stage Training: Cooperative SFT and RL for LLM Reasoning
  ICLR 2026 SPOT workshop

• Liang Chen, Xueting Han, Qizhou Wang, Bo Han, Jing Bai, Hinrich Schütze, Kam-Fai Wong.
  EEPO: Exploration-Enhanced Policy Optimization via Sample-Then-Forget
  ICLR 2026

• Liang Chen, Xueting Han, Li Shen, Jing Bai, Kam-Fai Wong.
  Vulnerability-Aware Alignment: Mitigating Uneven Forgetting in Harmful Fine-Tuning
  ICML 2025

• Liang Chen, Li Shen, Yang Deng, Xiaoyan Zhao, Bin Liang, Kam-Fai Wong.
  PEARL: Towards Permutation-Resilient LLMs
  ICLR 2025

• Liang Chen, Yatao Bian, Yang Deng, Deng Cai, Shuaiyi Li, Peilin Zhao, Kam-Fai Wong.
  WatME: Towards Lossless Watermarking Through Lexical Redundancy
  ACL 2024

• Liang Chen, Yang Deng, Yatao Bian, Zeyu Qin, Bingzhe Wu, Tat-Seng Chua, Kam-Fai Wong.
  Beyond Factuality: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Models as Knowledge Generators
  EMNLP 2023

• Liang Chen, Hongru Wang, Yang Deng, Wai Chung Kwan, Zezhong Wang, Kam-Fai Wong.
  Towards Robust Personalized Dialogue Generation via Representation Regularization
  ACL 2023 findings

Talks

• Beyond Two-Stage Training: Cooperative SFT and RL for Improved LLM Reasoning
  PhD Seminar, LMU Munich – August 2025
  Host: Prof. Hinrich Schütze

• Vulnerability-Aware Alignment: Protect Open-Source LLMs against Unsafe Fine-tuning
  AI Time, Online Live – June 2025

• Towards Trustworthy LLMs: Improving Robustness via Post-Training Optimization
  PhD Seminar, LMU Munich – May 2025
  Host: Prof. Hinrich Schütze

Teaching

I have served as a teaching assistant for the following courses:

• Operations Research II (SEEM3440) – Covers advanced optimization techniques, including non-linear, integer, and dynamic programming.
• Engineering Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SEEM3450) – A hands-on course focused on identifying engineering opportunities and developing business plans.

Internships

• Microsoft Research Asia, Systems Research Group
• Tencent AI Lab, Machine Learning Center

Community Service

• Reviewer for ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, AISTATS, ACL, EMNLP, and NAACL.

Honors & Scholarships

• Postgraduate Studentship, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
• School Scholarship, Peking University
• First-Class Scholarship, Northwestern Polytechnical University

Miscellaneous

Outside of research, I enjoy walking in parks, as well as swimming, hiking, and table tennis.

During my time at NWPU, I was the runner-up in the Freshmen Cup table tennis singles match and won the team championship three times.