Haonan Wang

Haonan Wang

王淏楠/ Hàonán Wáng /

Principal Research Scientist Tencent Hunyuan@Singapore

I am a Principal Research Scientist at Tencent Hunyuan, where I work on reinforcement learning (RL) for multimodal generation (video, image, text, etc.) and lead UniRL, our open-source RL framework for post-training foundation models toward agentic multimodal generation.

Concurrently, I am completing my PhD at the National University of Singapore, advised by Prof. Kenji Kawaguchi. Previously a PhD student at UIUC with Prof. Jingrui He, and B.S. in CS & Statistics at UIUC mentored by Prof. Jiawei Han.

My research builds systems that reason, plan, and learn from interaction — spanning long-context training, world models, LLM reasoning, autonomous agents, and reinforcement learning for unified multimodal generation.

Feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat about research or collaborate.

Research Arc // retrieval → long context → world models → reasoning → agents → agentic multimodal generation
Generative Retrieval
2022 Best Paper

Neural Corpus Indexer

Generative retrieval that indexes a corpus end-to-end inside model weights.

Core contributor · NeurIPS
Long-Context Training
2024

AnchorAttention

Diagnosed why BFloat16 silently breaks RoPE under long context — and patched it.

First author · TMLR
Video World Models
2025

Next-Event Prediction

A future-prediction objective for video — world models that anticipate events, not just tokens.

Co-first author · ICLR
LLM Reasoning
2025

Reasoning Systems

Parallel-decoding aggregation and demo-driven supervision for stronger reasoners.

First author · ICLR
Deep-Research Agents
2025

MiroThinker

Open-source deep-research agent scaling model, context, and interaction.

Open source · MiroMind
Agentic Generation
Now

UniRL

Open-source RL framework for post-training foundation models toward agentic multimodal generation.

Project lead · Tencent Hunyuan

Research Interests

// what I work on
01 / Generation

Agentic Multimodal Generation

Post-training foundation models with RL — toward agentic multimodal generation across modalities.

02 / Reasoning

LLM Reasoning

Improving how language models reason — through training, decoding, and inference-time aggregation.

03 / Agents

Autonomous Agents

Building agents that learn from interaction across web, mobile, and tool-use environments.

04 / Data

Data-Centric AI

Scrutinizing high-quality data to improve model capacity, reliability, and trustworthiness.

News

// recent updates

Publications

// selected — see Scholar for full list

left stripe = first / co-first author  ·  * denotes joint first author

2026ICLR

Think in Parallel, Answer as One: Logit Averaging for Open-Ended Reasoning

Haonan Wang, Chao Du, Kenji Kawaguchi, Tianyu Pang

International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR 2026

2026ICLR

SeedPrints: Fingerprints Can Even Tell Which Seed Your Large Language Model Was Trained From

Yao Tong*, Haonan Wang*, Siquan Li, Kenji Kawaguchi, Tianyang Hu

International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR 2026

2026ICLR

Fostering Video Reasoning via Next-Event Prediction

Haonan Wang*, Hongfu Liu*, Xiangyan Liu, Chao Du, Kenji Kawaguchi, Ye Wang, Tianyu Pang

International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR 2026

2026ICLR

Prefix-Tuning+: Modernizing Prefix-Tuning through Attention Independent Prefix Data

Haonan Wang, Brian Chen, Siquan Li, Xinhe Liang, Tianyang Hu, Hwee Kuan Lee, Kenji Kawaguchi

International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR 2026

2025PREPRINT

From Harm to Help: Turning Reasoning In-Context Demos into Assets for Reasoning LMs

Haonan Wang, Weida Liang, Zihang Fu, Zheng Nie, Yifan Zhang, Yao Tong, Tongyao Zhu, Hao Jiang, Chuang Li, Jiaying Wu, Kenji Kawaguchi

arXiv preprint 2509.23196 2025

2025NAACL

Boosting Visual-Language Models by Exploiting Hard Samples

Haonan Wang*, Minbin Huang*, Runhui Huang, Lanqing Hong, Hang Xu, Tianyang Hu, Xiaodan Liang, Zhenguo Li

North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics NAACL 2025

2024PREPRINT

Can AI Be as Creative as Humans?

Haonan Wang, James Zou, Michael Mozer, Linjun Zhang, Anirudh Goyal, Alex Lamb, Zhun Deng, Michael Qizhe Xie, Hannah Brown, Kenji Kawaguchi

arXiv preprint 2401.01623 2024

2023WSDM

Training Fair Deep Neural Networks by Balancing Influence

Haonan Wang*, Ziwei Wu*, Jingrui He

ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining WSDM 2023

2023TMLR

Can Single-Pass Contrastive Learning Work for Both Homophilic and Heterophilic Graph?

Haonan Wang, Jieyu Zhang, Qi Zhu, Wei Huang, Kenji Kawaguchi, Xiaokui Xiao

Transactions on Machine Learning Research TMLR 2023

2022NeurIPS

Deep Active Learning by Leveraging Training Dynamics

Haonan Wang, Wei Huang, Andrew Margenot, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems NeurIPS 2022

2022NeurIPS

Understanding Programmatic Weak Supervision via Source-Aware Influence Function

Jieyu Zhang*, Haonan Wang*, Cheng-Yu Hsieh, Alexander Ratner

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems NeurIPS 2022

2021WWW

Controllable Gradient Item Retrieval

Haonan Wang, Chang Zhou, Hongxia Yang, Carl Yang, Jingrui He

International World Wide Web Conference WWW 2021

2025NeurIPS

SkyLadder: Better and Faster Pretraining via Context Window Scheduling

Tongyao Zhu, Qian Liu, Haonan Wang, Shiqi Chen, Xiangming Gu, Tianyu Pang, Min-Yen Kan

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems NeurIPS 2025

2025NeurIPS

NoisyRollout: Reinforcing Visual Reasoning with Data Augmentation

Xiangyan Liu, Jinjie Ni, Zijian Wu, Chao Du, Longxu Dou, Haonan Wang, Tianyu Pang, Michael Qizhe Shieh

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems NeurIPS 2025

2026ICLR

Reinforcing General Reasoning without Verifiers

Xiangxin Zhou, Zichen Liu, Anya Sims, Haonan Wang, Tianyu Pang, Chongxuan Li, Liang Wang, Min Lin, Chao Du

International Conference on Learning Representations ICLR 2026

2026WACV

CONCORD: Concept-Informed Diffusion for Dataset Distillation

Jianyang Gu, Haonan Wang, Ruoxi Jia, Saeed Vahidian, Vyacheslav Kungurtsev, Wei Jiang, Yiran Chen

Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision WACV 2026

2024CVPR

Efficient Dataset Distillation via Minimax Diffusion

Jianyang Gu, Saeed Vahidian, Vyacheslav Kungurtsev, Haonan Wang, Wei Jiang, Yang You, Yiran Chen

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition CVPR 2024

Awards & Honors

// recognition
May 2026
ICML 2026 Gold Reviewer
Aug 2024
Research Achievement Award · NUS
Jun 2024
ICML 2024 Oral Paper · Top 2.37%
Dec 2023
NeurIPS 2023 Spotlight Paper · Top 3.06%
Dec 2022
NeurIPS 2022 Best Paper Award · Top 7/3391
Apr 2020
C.W. Gear Outstanding Undergraduate · UIUC

Experience

// where I've been

Teaching

// TA experience
NUS · CS5339

Theory & Algorithms for Machine Learning

Jan 2025 — May 2025

UIUC · IS 577

Data Mining

Aug 2021 — Dec 2021

UIUC · ECE 490

Introduction to Optimization

Jan 2020 — May 2020

Service

// reviewing

Conference & journal reviewer for top-tier ML and NLP venues.