Tenghao Huang

University of Southern California.

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Welcome to my personal webpage! My name is Tenghao Huang, a fourth-year PhD candidate at USC Viterbi School of Engineering. I am adviced by Prof. Jonathan May and Prof. Muhao Chen. I have interned at Amazon Alexa AI, IBM Research, Microsoft’s Office of Applied Research and Salesforce AI Research.

Before I join USC, I did my bachelor at UNC-CH. I was fortunate to be supervised by Prof. Snigdha Chaturvedi and Prof. Colin Raffel.

I am genuinely interested in how LLM agents can help human solve real-world problems. Specifically, I am curious about how LLM agents can enhance human productivity in task-oriented scenarios, such as writing, coding, and planning. Check out our NAACL 2025 tutorial on Creative Planning with LLMs!

I am also interested in studying AI creativity, especially how AI can assist human in composing longer and more interesting narratives. Our paper Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives? received the Outstanding Paper Award 🏆 at EMNLP 2024!

I am currently on the faculty job market this year and actively seeking academic positions.

news

Aug 25, 2025 I am excited to return as a part-time research intern at Microsoft in Fall 2025. My spring intern paper Teaching Language Models to Gather Information Proactively is accepted by EMNLP-Findings 2025. I will keep working on post-training LLMs to align with human preferences:)
May 19, 2025 Excited to start my summer internship at Salesforce!
May 15, 2025 Our paper R2D2: Remembering, Replaying and Dynamic Decision Making with a Reflective Agentic Memory is accepted by ACL 2025!
May 04, 2025 We’re so excited to have our tutorial presented at NAACL 2025. This is a tutorial on Creative Planning in Large Language Models.

selected publications

  1. arXiv
    WebDS: An End-to-End Benchmark for Web-based Data Science
    Ethan Hsu ,  Hong Meng Yam ,  Ines Bouissou ,  Aaron Murali John ,  Raj Thota ,  Josh Koe ,  Vivek Sarath Putta ,  GK Dharesan ,  Alexander Spangher ,  Shikhar Murty ,  Tenghao Huang ,  and  Christopher D Manning
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.01222, 2025
  2. arXiv
    DiscoSum: Discourse-aware News Summarization
    Alexander Spangher* ,  Tenghao Huang* ,  Jialiang. Gu* ,  Jiatong. Shi ,  and  Muhao Chen
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.06930, 2025
  3. EMNLP
    Teaching Language Models To Gather Information Proactively
    Tenghao Huang ,  Sihao Chen ,  Muhao Chen ,  Jonathan May ,  Longqi. Yang ,  Mengting. Wan ,  and  Pei. Zhou
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2025
  4. ACL
    NewsInterview: a Dataset and a Playground to Evaluate LLMs’ Grounding Gap via Informational Interviews
    Alexander Spangher ,  Michael Lu ,  Sriya Kalyan ,  Hyundong Cho ,  Tenghao Huang ,  Weijia Shi ,  and  Jonathan May
    Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025
    Oral
  5. ACL
    R2D2: Remembering, Replaying and Dynamic Decision Making with a Reflective Agentic Memory
    Tenghao Huang ,  Kinjal Basu ,  Ibrahim Abdelaziz ,  Pavan Kapanipathi ,  Jonathan May ,  and  Muhao Chen
    Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2025
  6. Workshop
    A Novel Multi-Document Retrieval Benchmark: Journalist Source-Selection in Newswriting
    Alexander Spangher* ,  Tenghao Huang* ,  Yiqin. Huang* ,  Lucas. Spangher ,  Sewon Min ,  and  Mark Dredze
    Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Knowledge-Augmented Methods for NLP, 2025
  7. KDD
    FoodPuzzle: Developing Large Language Model Agents as Flavor Scientists
    Tenghao Huang ,  Donghee Lee ,  John Sweeney ,  Jiatong Shi ,  Emily Steliotes ,  Matt Lange ,  Jonathan May ,  and  Muhao Chen
    Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (Datasets and Benchmarks Track), 2025
    Oral
  8. EMNLP
    Familiarity-Aware Evidence Compression for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
    Dongwon Jung ,  Qin Liu ,  Tenghao Huang ,  Ben Zhou ,  and  Muhao Chen
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2025
  9. NAACL
    Creative Planning with Language Models: Practice, Evaluation and Applications
    Alexander Spangher ,  Tenghao Huang ,  Philippe Laban ,  and  Nanyun Peng
    Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL: Tutorials, 2025
    Tutorial
  10. NAACL
    Planning and Editing What You Retrieve for Enhanced Tool Learning
    Tenghao Huang ,  Dongwon Jung ,  and  Muhao Chen
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL, 2024
  11. EMNLP
    Red Teaming Language Models for Contradictory Dialogues
    Xiaofei Wen ,  Bangzheng Li ,  Tenghao Huang ,  and  Muhao Chen
    Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2024
  12. EMNLP
    Are Large Language Models Capable of Generating Human-Level Narratives?
    Yufei Tian* ,  Tenghao Huang* ,  Miri Liu ,  Derek Jiang ,  Alexander Spangher ,  Muhao Chen ,  Jonathan May ,  and  Nanyun Peng
    Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2024
    Outstanding Paper Award
  13. ICML
    Git-Theta: A Git Extension for Collaborative Development of Machine Learning Models
    Nikhil Kandpal ,  Brian Lester ,  Mohammed Muqeeth ,  Alexandre Mascarenhas ,  Michael Evans ,  Vignesh Baskaran ,  Jay Mohta ,  Derek Tam ,  Tenghao Huang ,  Haokun Liu ,  and  Colin Raffel
    Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023
  14. EMNLP
    Affective and Dynamic Beam Search for Story Generation
    Tenghao Huang ,  Ehsan Qasemi ,  Bangzheng Li ,  He Wang ,  Faeze Brahman ,  Muhao Chen ,  and  Snigdha Chaturvedi
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2023
  15. NAACL
    Revisiting Generative Commonsense Reasoning: A Pre-Ordering Approach
    Chao Zhao ,  Faeze Brahman ,  Tenghao Huang ,  and  Snigdha Chaturvedi
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL, 2022
  16. NeurIPS
    Few-shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning
    Haokun Liu ,  Derek Tam ,  Mohammed Muqeeth ,  Jay Mohta ,  Tenghao Huang ,  Mohit Bansal ,  and  Colin A. Raffel
    Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2022
  17. ACL
    Read Top News First: A Document Reordering Approach for Multi-Document News Summarization
    Tenghao Huang* ,  Chao Zhao* ,  Somnath Basu Roy Chowdhury ,  Muthu Kumar Chandrasekaran ,  Kathleen McKeown ,  and  Snigdha Chaturvedi
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL, 2022
  18. EMNLP
    Uncovering Implicit Gender Bias in Narratives through Commonsense Inference
    Tenghao Huang ,  Faeze Brahman ,  Vered Shwartz ,  and  Snigdha Chaturvedi
    Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP, 2021