First-Year Ph.D. Student

Haoyan Yang

I study the Self-X of large language models — teaching them to improve, assess, and reflect on themselves.

Stony Brook University · CS · Advised by Prof. Jiawei Zhou
Haoyan Yang
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About

My work centers on the Self-X Of LLMs, especially Self-Improvement: the ability of a model to evolve on its own, continuously, without human supervision. I'm drawn to this because the traditional recipe of more data and more human supervision is starting to hit a ceiling, while today's LLM agents can already generate data, call tools, and run code on their own. So I believe the next step is for a model to drive its own progress, learning and improving by itself. Around self-improvement, I also explore related abilities such as Self-Assessment and Self-Reflection, since both are necessary conditions for achieving it.

I am also interested in RL, Post-Training, RAG, Trustworthy LLMs, and Knowledge Reasoning.

Self-improvement schematic
From human supervision to self-improvement
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News

May 2026
New PaperCapability Self-Assessment: Teaching LLMs to Know Their Limits
Apr 2026
New PaperSelf-Improvement of Large Language Models: A Technical Overview and Future Outlook
Mar 2026
Aug 2025
New PositionStarted my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stony Brook University
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Selected Publications

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Work Experience

Jun 2026 — Present
Stony Brook University Research Assistant
Stony Brook, NY · Advisor: Prof. Jiawei Zhou

Self-X of LLMs. Researching self-improvement of large language models.

Jan 2025 — May 2025
GE HealthCare Research Intern
Remote, WA · Advisor: Dr. Runxue Bao

Reliability of LLMs. Developed a Reasoning-based Bias Detector (RBD) to debias LLM-as-a-judge evaluations.

Sep 2024 — May 2025
S&P Global Ratings NYU Capstone Collaborator
New York, NY · Advisor: Mr. Urjit Patel · Capstone Best Poster Award

LLM for Finance. Built Fin-RAG, a RAG-enhanced system with dynamic chunking and hybrid retrieval for financial QA.

May 2024 — Aug 2024
Samsung Research America Research Intern
Mountain View, CA · Advisors: Dr. Ting Hua & Dr. Shangqian Gao

Self-Improvement of LLMs. Proposed Dynamic Noise Preference Optimization (DNPO), leveraging synthetic data to enable LLM self-improvement.

Mar 2024 — Aug 2025
NYU Langone Health Research Assistant
Remote, NY · Advisor: Dr. Yiqiu Shen

LLM for Healthcare. Built an automated multi-modal pipeline for breast ultrasound report generation.

Mar 2023 — Jun 2023
Ping An Technology Research Intern
Shenzhen, China · Advisor: Mr. Zhitao Li

RAG in LLMs. Developed PRCA, a pluggable adapter improving retrieval-augmented QA with black-box LLMs.

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Education

2019 — 2023 2023 — 2025 2025 — Present
2019 — 2023
BSc in Data Science
GPA 3.84 / 4.0 (1st/94)
2023 — 2025
MSc in Data Science
GPA 3.92 / 4.0
2025 — Present
Ph.D. in Computer Science
GPA 4.0 / 4.0