I am a Ph.D. student at NUSNLP lab supervised by Hwee Tou Ng, in the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. I work on Natural Language Processing, with the current focus on Aligning Large Language Models and Agents.

Prior to my Ph.D. study, I received a Bachelor of Engineering (Computer Science) in 2020 from Nanyang Technological University, where I collaborated with Sinno Jialin Pan, Jianfei Cai and Jun Luo. During my bachelor’s study, I also had the opportunity to go on exchange programs at both TUM and UCLA. Additionally, I also did several internships at ByteDance AI Lab, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology Centre (SMART), and Lazada, and collaborated with Yuchen Zhang, Alexander R. Cobb, and Jun Lang.

If you are interested in my CV, please drop an email at caomichael19@gmail.com :)

More about me: In my spare time, I love swimming, cycling, and playing tennis. Traveling and exploring diverse cultures also captivate me. I’ve had the pleasure of living for over a year in the charming city of Cambridge, UK (2006), and have also spent an enriching six-month in Los Angeles, USA (2016), and Munich, Germany (2018).

Under Review Papers

A Constrained Text Revision Agent via Iterative Planning and Searching

Hannan Cao, Hwee Tou Ng

Rationalize and Align: Enhancing Writing Assistance with Rationale via Self-Training for Improved Alignment

Hannan Cao, Hai Ye, Hwee Tou Ng

Educations

Ph.D. in Computer Science

National University of Singapore, 2020.08 - now

Research Achievement Award

B.Eng. in School of Computer Science of Engineering

Nanyang Technological University, 2016.08 - 2020.06

Degree with honors (Highest distinction)
Minor in Mathematics
CGPA: 4.78/5.0
Dean’s List (top 5% of the cohort): 2017 - 2018, 2019 - 2020
NTU President Research Scholar 2017 - 2018, 2018 - 2019
NTU Science and Engineering Undergraduate Scholarship

💻 Internships

2022.07 - 2023.07, ByteDance AI Lab, Singapore.
2019.03 - 2019.08, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research & Technology Centre, Singapore.
2018.05 - 2018.08, Lazada, Singapore.

Invited Talks

The 2023 Singapore Symposium on Natural Language Processing (SSNLP)

Reviewer/PC member for:

ACL Rolling Review (ARR), 2025
International World Wide Web Conferences (WWW), 2024
Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA), 2023

Hannan Cao

Under Review Papers

A Constrained Text Revision Agent via Iterative Planning and Searching

Rationalize and Align: Enhancing Writing Assistance with Rationale via Self-Training for Improved Alignment

Peer-Reviewed Publications

A Unified Explanation for the Morphology and Carbon Storage of Raised Peatlands

Unsupervised Grammatical Error Correction Rivaling Supervised Methods

Mitigating Exposure Bias in Grammatical Error Correction with Data Augmentation and Reweighting

Grammatical Error Correction: A Survey of the State of the Art

Grammatical Error Correction with Contrastive Learning in Low Error Density Domains