Assistant Professor · PhD Supervisor

Haobo Wang 王皓波

School of Software Technology
Zhejiang University

My research aims to build intelligent systems that learn reliably from imperfect data, reason and act in complex environments, and work effectively with structured knowledge. My current interests include data-centric machine learning, LLM reasoning and agents, and table and structured data intelligence.

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What we are exploring now

Current research threads

Three connected directions toward more efficient reasoning, richer model supervision, and reliable intelligence over structured data.

01Reasoning efficiency

Data-efficient RLVR

DE-Venus & beyond

To our knowledge, DE-Venus is the first unified framework for annotation-efficient RLVR post-training. Its modular supervision layer over verl makes data selection, weak supervision, and online refinement easy to use, compare, and extend without rewriting distributed training.

10% labels · as little as 13% data · 63–75% fewer steps

DE-VenusUnified supervision lifecycle PivotTraceAttention-based data triage GeoMinGeometric weak-signal filtering TraPOTrajectory-aware semi-supervision

02Distillation

On-policy distillation

OPRD & related methods

Effective on-policy distillation depends on where and what we distill. OPRD moves supervision into hidden-state space; Purified OPSD removes reference-induced shortcuts; and CriPO recovers criterion-level learning signals suppressed by scalar rewards.

OPRD: 1.44× faster · up to 54% less memory

OPRDHidden-state on-policy distillation OPRD-BridgeCross-model representation transfer Purified OPSDPMI-filtered transferable supervision CriPOCriterion-distilled policy optimization

03Structured intelligence

Table intelligence

The TableGPT series

The TableGPT series establishes tables as a first-class modality for language models. It progresses from structure-aware encoding to reinforcement-learned agents that can understand, reason over, and act on real-world tables.

4K+ monthly model downloads on Hugging Face · Oct 2026

TableGPTOpen model family on Hugging Face TableGPT-R1RL for agentic table reasoning TAMOTable as a native model modality TableSeekStructure-preserving evidence seeking

Selected publications

Full list

^* Corresponding author

SCIS 2026

DataXman: Selecting and Mixing Pretraining Data via Bilingual Mixture-of-Experts Data Manager

Ru Peng, Jinyang Zhang, Yawen Zeng, et al., Haobo Wang*, et al.

ICLR 2026

TraPO: A Semi-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Framework for Boosting LLM Reasoning

Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Haobo Wang*, et al.

ICLR 2026

Stop Unnecessary Reflection: Training LRMs for Efficient Reasoning with Adaptive Reflection and Length Coordinated Penalty

Zewei Yu, Lirong Gao, Sheng Guo, et al., Haobo Wang*

KDD 2026

FLaG: Fine-Grained Latent Grouping for Hallucination Detection

Wentao Ye, Liyao Li, Zhiqing Xiao, et al., Haobo Wang*

ICML 2026

Awakening Visual Reasoning: Mitigating Post-Training Failure in Vision-Text Compression

Xing Xi, Liyao Li, Hao Chen, et al., Haobo Wang*

ACL 2026

Everyone is Unique: Towards Behaviorally Heterogeneous Negotiation Dialogue Systems

Yuhang Yang, Kai Tang, Chao Ye, Haobo Wang*, et al.

ACL Findings 2026

FinMRAGBench: A Realistic and Complex Benchmark for Multi-Modal RAG in Financial Document Analysis

Shouqing Yang, Qi Zhang, Yuhang Yang, et al., Haobo Wang*, et al.

AAAI 2026

An Invariant Latent Space Perspective on Language Model Inversion

Wentao Ye, Jiaqi Hu, Haobo Wang*, et al.

NeurIPS 2025

Harnessing Feature Resonance under Arbitrary Target Alignment for Out-of-Distribution Node Detection

Shenzhi Yang, Junbo Zhao, Sharon Li, et al., Haobo Wang*

NeurIPS 2025

Table as a Modality for Large Language Models

Liyao Li, Chao Ye, Wentao Ye, et al., Haobo Wang, et al.

EMNLP 2025

LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization

Qi Zhang, Shouqing Yang, Lirong Gao, et al., Haobo Wang*, et al.

EMNLP Findings 2025

LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains

Liyao Li, Jiaming Tian, Hao Chen, et al., Haobo Wang, et al.

EMNLP Demo 2025

CrowdAgent: Multi-Agent Managed Multi-Source Annotation System

Maosheng Qin, Renyu Zhu, Mingxuan Xia, et al., Haobo Wang*

ACL 2025

Prompt Candidates, then Distill: A Teacher-Student Framework for LLM-driven Data Annotation

Mingxuan Xia, Haobo Wang*, Sharon Li, et al.

ACL Findings 2025

RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis

Pengzuo Wu, Yuhang Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, et al., Haobo Wang*

VLDB 2025

CoLA: Model Collaboration for Log-based Anomaly Detection

Xuhang Zhu, Xiu Tang, Sai Wu, Jichen Li, Haobo Wang, et al.

Best of VLDB Journal

ICML 2025

How to Steer LLM Latents for Hallucination Detection?

Seongheon Park, Xuefeng Du, Min-Hsuan Yeh, Haobo Wang, Sharon Li

AAAI 2025

Multi-Instance Multi-Label Classification from Crowdsourced Labels

Ziquan Wang, Mingxuan Xia, Xiangyu Ren, et al., Haobo Wang*

ICLR 2025

Bridging the Semantic Gap Between Text and Table: A Case Study on NL2SQL

Lin Long, Xijun Gu, Xinjie Sun, et al., Haobo Wang, et al.

NeurIPS 2024

Locating What You Need: Towards Adapting Diffusion Models to OOD Concepts In-the-Wild

Jianan Yang, Chenchao Gao, Zhiqing Xiao, Haobo Wang*, et al.

ACL 2024

Learning Geometry-Aware Representations for New Intent Discovery

Kai Tang, Junbo Zhao, Xiao Ding, et al., Haobo Wang*

ACL Findings 2024

On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey

Lin Long, Rui Wang, Ruixuan Xiao, et al., Haobo Wang*

EMNLP Findings 2024

FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents

Ruixuan Xiao, Wentao Ma, Ke Wang, et al., Haobo Wang*, et al.

KDD 2024

CoMAL: Contrastive Active Learning for Multi-Label Text Classification

Cheng Peng, Haobo Wang*, et al.

ICML 2024

Unbiased Multi-Label Learning from Crowdsourced Annotations

Mingxuan Xia, Zenan Huang, Runze Wu, et al., Haobo Wang*

CVPR 2024

Targeted Representation Alignment for Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning

Ruixuan Xiao, Lei Feng, Kai Tang, Junbo Zhao, Sharon Li, et al., Haobo Wang*

AAAI 2024

A Separation and Alignment Framework for Black-box Domain Adaptation

Mingxuan Xia, Junbo Zhao, Gengyu Lyu, et al., Haobo Wang*

WWW 2024

Towards Cross-Table Masked Pretraining for Web Data Mining

Chao Ye, Guoshan Lu, Haobo Wang, et al.

TPAMI 2024

PiCO+: Contrastive Label Disambiguation for Robust Partial Label Learning

Haobo Wang, Ruixuan Xiao, Sharon Li, et al.

TKDD 2024

On the Value of Head Labels in Multi-Label Text Classification

Haobo Wang, Cheng Peng, Hede Dong, et al.

VLDB Demo 2024

CORAL: Collaborative Automatic Labeling System based on Large Language Models

Zhen Zhu, Yibo Wang, Shouqing Yang, et al., Haobo Wang*

NeurIPS 2023

Debiased and Denoised Entity Recognition from Distant Supervision

Haobo Wang, Yiwen Dong, Ruixuan Xiao, et al.

IJCAI 2023

ProMix: Combating Label Noise via Maximizing Clean Sample Utility

Ruixuan Xiao, Yiwen Dong, Haobo Wang*, et al.

1st Place, Learning and Mining with Noisy Labels Challenge

NeurIPS 2022

SoLar: Sinkhorn Label Refinery for Imbalanced Partial-Label Learning

Haobo Wang, Mingxuan Xia, Sharon Li, et al.

ICLR 2022

PiCO: Contrastive Label Disambiguation for Partial Label Learning

Haobo Wang, Ruixuan Xiao, Sharon Li, et al.

Outstanding Paper Award Honorable Mention

NeurIPS 2026

Smart Picks in the Dark: Towards Efficient RLVR for Reasoning via Tracing Metacognitive Pivots

Guangcheng Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Haobo Wang*, Xing Zheng, Yingfan Ma, Xuening Feng, Zhongqi Chen, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen.

ICLR 2026

TraPO: A Semi-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Framework for Boosting LLM Reasoning

Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Haobo Wang*, Xing Zheng, Yingfan Ma, Zhongqi Chen, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen.

ICLR 2026

Stop Unnecessary Reflection: Training LRMs for Efficient Reasoning with Adaptive Reflection and Length Coordinated Penalty

Zewei Yu, Lirong Gao, Sheng Guo, Yuke Zhu, Bo Zheng, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang*.

ICML 2026

Awakening Visual Reasoning: Mitigating Post-Training Failure in Vision-Text Compression

Xing Xi, Liyao Li, Hao Chen, Ningtao Wang, Peixian Chen, Peilin Tong, Xing Fu, Yu Cheng, Haobo Wang*, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao, Ronghua Luo.

KDD 2026

FLaG: Fine-Grained Latent Grouping for Hallucination Detection

Wentao Ye, Liyao Li, Zhiqing Xiao, Muzhi Zhu, Jiaqi Hu, Zhanming Shen, Xiaomeng Hu, Sean Du, Haobo Wang*.

ACL 2026

Everyone is Unique: Towards Behaviorally Heterogeneous Negotiation Dialogue Systems

Yuhang Yang, Kai Tang, Chao Ye, Haobo Wang*, Qiqi Luo, Jin Guang Zheng, Zhixin Zhang.

ACL Findings 2026

FinMRAGBench: A Realistic and Complex Benchmark for Multi-Modal RAG in Financial Document Analysis

Shouqing Yang, Qi Zhang, Yuhang Yang, Ruikang Xu, Yuwei Hou, Zhulin Jia, Lirong Gao, Haobo Wang*, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Gang Chen.

EMNLP 2026

PROBE: Prospective Retrieval with Oracle-Based End-Goal Distillation for Multi-Hop Question Answering

Xu Lu, Zhengqing Zang, Binhui Yao, Luwei Yang, Ruimin Chen, Zeng Wang, Haobo Wang*.

EMNLP 2026

DeltaMem: Towards Agentic Memory Management via Reinforcement Learning

Qi Zhang, Shen Huang, Liuchu, Shouqing Yang, Xiaomeng Hu, Pengjun Xie, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao.

EMNLP Findings 2026

SkillComposer: Learning to Evolve Agent Skills for Specification and Generalization

Qi Zhang, Zhaopeng Feng, Xiaonan Shi, Xiaomeng Hu, Liuchu, Pengjun Xie, Xiaobin Wang, Bryan Hooi, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao.

AAAI 2026

An Invariant Latent Space Perspective on Language Model Inversion

Wentao Ye, Jiaqi Hu, Haobo Wang*, Xinpeng Ti, Zhiqing Xiao, Hao Chen, Liyao Li, Lei Feng, Sai Wu, Junbo Zhao.

SCIS 2026

DataXman: Selecting and Mixing Pretraining Data via Bilingual Mixture-of-Experts Data Manager

Ru Peng, Jinyang Zhang, Yawen Zeng, Kexin Yang, Junyang Lin, Haobo Wang*, Gang Chen, Jingren Zhou, Dayiheng Liu, Junbo Zhao.

NeurIPS 2025

Harnessing Feature Resonance under Arbitrary Target Alignment for Out-of-Distribution Node Detection

Shenzhi Yang, Junbo Zhao, Sharon Li, Shouqing Yang, Dingyu Yang, Xiaofang Zhang, Haobo Wang*.

NeurIPS 2025

Table as a Modality for Large Language Models

Liyao Li, Chao Ye, Wentao Ye, Yifei Sun, Zhe Jiang, Haobo Wang, Jiaming Tian, Yiming Zhang, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

EMNLP 2025

LeTS: Learning to Think-and-Search via Process-and-Outcome Reward Hybridization

Qi Zhang, Shouqing Yang, Lirong Gao, Hao Chen, Xiaomeng Hu, Jinglei Chen, Jiexiang Wang, Sheng Guo, Bo Zheng, Haobo Wang*, Junbo Zhao.

EMNLP Findings 2025

LongTableBench: Benchmarking Long-Context Table Reasoning across Real-World Formats and Domains

Liyao Li, Jiaming Tian, Hao Chen, Wentao Ye, Chao Ye, Haobo Wang, Ningtao Wang, Xing Fu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

EMNLP Demo 2025

CrowdAgent: Multi-Agent Managed Multi-Source Annotation System

Maosheng Qin, Renyu Zhu, Mingxuan Xia, Chenchenkai, Zhen Zhu, Minmin Lin, Junbo Zhao, Lu Xu, Changjie Fan, Runze Wu, Haobo Wang*.

ACL 2025

Prompt Candidates, then Distill: A Teacher-Student Framework for LLM-driven Data Annotation

Mingxuan Xia, Haobo Wang*, Sharon Li, Zewei Yu, Jindong Wang, Junbo Zhao, Runze Wu.

ACL Findings 2025

RealHiTBench: A Comprehensive Realistic Hierarchical Table Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-Based Table Analysis

Pengzuo Wu, Yuhang Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Chao Ye, Hong Gu, Xu Lu, Ruixuan Xiao, Bowen Bao, Yijing He, Liangyu Zha, Wentao Ye, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang*.

VLDB 2025

CoLA: Model Collaboration for Log-based Anomaly Detection

Xuhang Zhu, Xiu Tang, Sai Wu, Jichen Li, Haobo Wang, Chang Yao, Quanqing Xu, Gang Chen.

Best of VLDB Journal

ICML 2025

How to Steer LLM Latents for Hallucination Detection?

Seongheon Park, Xuefeng Du, Min-Hsuan Yeh, Haobo Wang, Sharon Li.

ICLR 2025

Bridging the Semantic Gap Between Text and Table: A Case Study on NL2SQL

Lin Long, Xijun Gu, Xinjie Sun, Wentao Ye, Haobo Wang, Sai Wu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

NeurIPS 2024

Locating What You Need: Towards Adapting Diffusion Models to OOD Concepts In-the-Wild

Jianan Yang, Chenchao Gao, Zhiqing Xiao, Haobo Wang*, Sai Wu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

ACL Findings 2024

On LLMs-Driven Synthetic Data Generation, Curation, and Evaluation: A Survey

Lin Long, Rui Wang, Ruixuan Xiao, Junbo Zhao, Xiao Ding, Gang Chen, Haobo Wang*.

EMNLP Findings 2024

FlowBench: Revisiting and Benchmarking Workflow-Guided Planning for LLM-based Agents

Ruixuan Xiao, Wentao Ma, Ke Wang, Yuchuan Wu, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang*, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li.

CVPR 2024

Targeted Representation Alignment for Open-World Semi-Supervised Learning

Ruixuan Xiao, Lei Feng, Kai Tang, Junbo Zhao, Sharon Li, Gang Chen, Haobo Wang*.

WWW 2024

Towards Cross-Table Masked Pretraining for Web Data Mining

Chao Ye, Guoshan Lu, Haobo Wang, Liyao Li, Sai Wu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

TPAMI 2024

PiCO+: Contrastive Label Disambiguation for Robust Partial Label Learning

Haobo Wang, Ruixuan Xiao, Sharon Li, Lei Feng, Gang Niu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

TKDD 2024

On the Value of Head Labels in Multi-Label Text Classification

Haobo Wang, Cheng Peng, Hede Dong, Lei Feng, Weiwei Liu, Tianlei Hu, Ke Chen, Gang Chen.

VLDB Demo 2024

CORAL: Collaborative Automatic Labeling System based on Large Language Models

Zhen Zhu, Yibo Wang, Shouqing Yang, Lin Long, Runze Wu, Xiu Tang, Junbo Zhao, Haobo Wang*.

NeurIPS 2023

Debiased and Denoised Entity Recognition from Distant Supervision

Haobo Wang, Yiwen Dong, Ruixuan Xiao, Fei Huang, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

IJCAI 2023

ProMix: Combating Label Noise via Maximizing Clean Sample Utility

Ruixuan Xiao, Yiwen Dong, Haobo Wang*, Lei Feng, Runze Wu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

(Ranked 1st (all tasks) in the Learning and Mining with Noisy Labels Challenge in IJCAI 2022)

NeurIPS 2022

SoLar: Sinkhorn Label Refinery for Imbalanced Partial-Label Learning

Haobo Wang, Mingxuan Xia, Sharon Li, Yuren Mao, Lei Feng, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

ICLR 2022

PiCO: Contrastive Label Disambiguation for Partial Label Learning

Haobo Wang, Ruixuan Xiao, Sharon Li, Lei Feng, Gang Niu, Gang Chen, Junbo Zhao.

(This paper was selected for Outstanding Paper Award Honorable Mention, top 10 in 3391 submissions.)

Education

2018–2023

Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence
Zhejiang University · Advisors: Prof. Gang Chen and Prof. Tianlei Hu

2017–2018

Visiting Student
University of New South Wales · Advisors: Prof. Xuemin Lin and Prof. Weiwei Liu

2014–2018

B.E. in Computer Science
Zhejiang University · Advisor: Prof. Yunjun Gao

Experience

2023–Now

Assistant Professor · Ph.D. Supervisor
School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University

2019–2020

Research Intern
Alibaba Group · Hangzhou, China

2018–2019

Intern
NetEase Inc. · Hangzhou, China

Selected honors

2025

WAIC Yunfan Award, Rising Star Nomination

2023

“Wu Wen-Jun” CAAI Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation

2023

ACM China Doctoral Dissertation Award (Hangzhou Chapter)

2022

ICLR Outstanding Paper Award Honorable Mention

2022

ICML Outstanding Reviewer

Academic service

Action Editor

Transactions on Machine Learning Research

Area Chair

ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP

Reviewer

TPAMI, TKDE, TNNLS, TCSVT, Pattern Recognition