About

Hi, I am Haikang Deng, a second-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 and diversity methods. I did my undergrad at UNC Chapel Hill where I was advised by Prof. Colin Raffel.

Research

Decoupling Task-Solving and Output Formatting in LLM Generation
Haikang Deng, Po-Nien Kung, Nanyun Peng arXiv Preprint, 2025
arXiv · PDF

Reward-Augmented Decoding: Efficient Controlled Text Generation With a Unidirectional Reward Model
Haikang Deng, Colin Raffel EMNLP, 2023
arXiv · PDF · Code

TaoBench: Do Automated Theorem Prover LLMs Generalize Beyond MathLib?
Alexander K. Taylor, Junyi Zhang, Ethan Ji, Vigyan Sahai, Haikang Deng, Yuanzhou Chen, Yifan Yuan, Di Wu, Jia-Chen Gu, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng, Amit Sahai, Wei Wang arXiv Preprint, 2026
arXiv · PDF · Code

Learning Structured Reasoning via Tractable Trajectory Control
Po-Nien Kung, Zhen Yang, Jeffrey Luo, Cheng-Fu Yang, Haikang Deng, Zi-Yi Dou, Yinfei Yang, Nanyun Peng, Zhe Gan, Kai-Wei Chang arXiv Preprint, 2026
arXiv · PDF

DialectGen: Benchmarking and Improving Dialect Robustness in Multimodal Generation
Yu Zhou, Sohyun An, Haikang Deng, Da Yin, Clark Peng, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng arXiv Preprint, 2025
arXiv · PDF · Code

Large Language Models Struggle to Learn Long Tail Knowledge
Nikhil Kandpal, Haikang Deng, Adam Roberts, Eric Wallace, Colin Raffel ICML, 2023
arXiv · PDF · Code