I am Xinghao Chen, a joint Ph.D. student at the NLP Group of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University & EIT NLP of Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, fortunately supervised by Dr. Xiaoyu Shen and Prof. Wenjie Li. I received my bachelor’s degree from the College of Artifical Intelligence at Nankai University in 2023.

Research

I am interested in natural language processing. My current research focuses on 1) Chain-of-Thought reasoning, and 2) tool calling.

News

[2025.08] Got two papers accepted by EMNLP 2025🎉!
[2025.05] Released our new survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning.
[2025.05] Got one papers accepted by ACL 2025🎉!
[2024.10] Got one short paper accepted by EMNLP 2024.
[2024.09] Started my Ph.D. study at the NLP Group @ PolyU & EIT NLP, supervised by Dr. Xiaoyu Shen and Prof. Wenjie Li.

Publications

Most recent publications on Google Scholar.
* indicates equal contribution

Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Xinghao Chen*, Anhao Zhao*, Heming Xia, Xuan Lu, Hanlin Wang, Yanjun Chen, Wei Zhang, Jian Wang^†, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen^†
Arxiv 2025. [link] [code]

Rethinking Visual Layer Selection in Multimodal LLMs
Haoran Chen*, Junyan Lin*, Xinghao Chen, Yue Fan, Xin Jin, Hui Su, Jianfeng Dong, Jinlan Fu, Xiaoyu Shen
EMNLP 2025. [link]

MultiConIR: Towards multi-condition Information Retrieval
Xuan Lu, Sifan Liu, Bochao Yin, Yongqi Li, Xinghao Chen, Hui Su, Yaohui Jin, Wenjun Zeng, Xiaoyu Shen
Findings of EMNLP 2025. [link] [code]

Unveiling the Key Factors for Distilling Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Xinghao Chen, Zhijing Sun, Wenjin Guo, Miaoran Zhang, Yanjun Chen, Yirong Sun, Hui Su, Yijie Pan, Dietrich Klakow, Wenjie Li, Xiaoyu Shen
Findings of ACL 2025. [link] [code] (Oral Presentation @ PolyU COMP 2025 Research Student Conference)

The Accuracy Paradox in RLHF: When Better Reward Models Don’t Yield Better Language Models
Yanjun Chen, Dawei Zhu, Yirong Sun, Xinghao Chen, Wei Zhang, Xiaoyu Shen
EMNLP 2024. [link] [code]

Smart building evacuation by tracking multi-camera network and explainable Re-identification model
Yifei Ding, Xinghao Chen, Yuxin Zhang, Xinyan Huang
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence. [link]

Smart real-time evaluation of tunnel fire risk and evacuation safety via computer vision
Xiaoning Zhang, Xinghao Chen, Yifei Ding, Yuxin Zhang, Zilong Wang, Jihao Shi, Nils Johansson, Xinyan Huang
Safety Science. [link]

Service

Teaching Assistant:
COMP 5241: Software Engineering and Development, Fall 2025, PolyU
COMP 1411: Introduction to Computer Systems, Spring 2025, PolyU
COMP 5511: Artificial Intelligence Concepts, Fall 2024, PolyU

Invited Talks

[2025.06] Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning at NICE and CIPS. [video]