Jiawen Duan (段嘉文)

M.Phil Student

Department of Computing,
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

Github | Email | Google Scholar

Jiawen Duan

Hi! I am Jiawen, a first-year MPhil student fortunately advised by Prof. Wenjie Li at the PolyU NLP Lab, where I work on Natural Language Processing in the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU). Before that, I earned my Bachelor’s degree in PolyU studying Linguistics with a Secondary Major in Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics, where I was honored to work under Prof. Wenjie Li’s guidance. During the summer, I was also honored to work with Prof. Hualou Liang on LLM agents for Alzheimer’s disease detection.

My research interests lie in interactive large language models and cognitive computing, and I am especially interested in emotions. Currently, I am exploring virtual reality for social good.

Selected Publications

Foresight Optimization
Foresight Optimization for Strategic Reasoning in Large Language Models
Jiashuo Wang*, Jiawen Duan*, Jian Wang, Kaitao Song, Chunpu Xu, Johnny K. W. Ho, Fenggang Yu, Wenjie Li†, Johan F. Hoorn
Oral paper in the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
arXiv

Honors and Awards

  • HKSAR Government Scholarship Fund
    Talent Development Scholarship (HK$10,000) for Outstanding InnoTech Achievements, 2025/26.
  • The 11th 「Internet+」 互聯網+ Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (National Bronze Award)
    Our project, "Innovative Structure-Based Type IV Hydrogen Storage Bottle," was selected for the Hong Kong SAR team.
  • Dean's Certificate of Academic Achievement
    Awarded for academic excellence in the Faculty of Humanities, 2024/25.
  • The 10th 「創青春」 Youth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition (Third Prize)
    Our project, "Practices and Applications of New Agricultural Biotechnology in the Dual Carbon Context," was awarded third prize at the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area Youth Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition.

Education

  • 2026.09 - Present, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Department of Computing, the PolyU NLP Lab.
  • 2022.09 - 2026.06, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Department of Language Science and Technology.
  • 2019.09 - 2022.06, The Affiliated High-school of Peking Univerisity. Yuanpei Program.

Experiences

  • 2026.06 - 2026.09, Research Assistant at the Liang’s Lab.
  • 2025.04 - 2026.06, Undergraduate Researcher at The PolyU NLP Lab.

Demo

Here is a demo me and my friends Siyuan Liu and Jingwen Yang made.

BreakBeat
BreakBeat: AI-Powered Dance Movement Segmentation & Choreography Insight Platform
Demo in Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025
YouTube

Misc.

  • I love dancing and worked as a dance instructor at the HKU Yue Rong Dance Troupe in 2024. I was also the 14th Committee Member of PolyU Hall Dance Team (Performance Team Manager).
  • I am interested in exploring how LLMs' could better understand dance, especially on the dancers' emotions or intentions.
  • I enjoy paiting pictures. Check out one of my favorite work!
One of my paintings