Hi, I am Haikang Deng, a first-year PhD at UCLA under the supervision of Prof. Nanyun Peng. My research interests lie in the intersection of natural language processing and machine learning, with a focus on controlled generation with decoding-time methods. I did my undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill where I was advised by Prof. Colin Raffel.

Publications

Reward-Augmented Decoding: Efficient Controlled Text Generation With a Unidirectional Reward Model

Haikang Deng, Colin Raffel

EMNLP, 2023, Singapore

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While large language models have proven effective in a huge range of downstream applications, they often generate text that is problematic or lacks a desired attribute. In this paper, we introduce Reward-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a text generation procedure that uses a small unidirectional reward model to encourage a language model... [Read More]

Large Language Models Struggle to Learn Long Tail Knowledge

Nikhil Kandpal, Haikang Deng, Adam Roberts, Eric Wallace, Colin Raffel

ICML, 2023, Honolulu, Hawaii

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The Internet contains a wealth of knowledge – from the birthdays of historical figures to tutorials on how to code – all of which may be learned by language models. However, while certain pieces of information are ubiquitous on the web, others appear extremely rarely. In this paper, we study... [Read More]

Experience

Research Assistant @ UNC NLP

Aug 2022 ~ Present


  • Benchmarked various Learning from Human Feedback methods and studied their overoptimization problem
  • Introduced an efficient weighted decoding method that aligns text to a given attribute with uni-directional reward model
  • Explored language models’ knowledge-learning process and their QA performance relative to their pre-training data
  • Analyzed language model hallucination and tracked wrong answers in training corpus

Software Dev Engineer Intern @ Amazon

May 2022 ~ Aug 2022


  • Built a Horizonte Service for Local Landing Page which displays local products available for pick up
  • Deployed the service to production and verified its reliability with production data
  • Onboarded downstream dependencies to fetch data and extended JSP to render user interface
  • Configured shopping portal page type and added routing rules from amazon.com

Software Engineer Intern @ Lenovo

May 2021 ~ Aug 2021


  • Trained Encoder-Decoder LSTM for anomaly detection on time series data.
  • Participated in the design of Control Chart and Anomaly Detection Module.
  • Performed model tuning and data grouping which improved f1 score from 0.41 to 0.48.