My name is Liyan Tang (唐立言 in Chinese). I’m a fifth-year (final year) Ph.D. student in Computer Science from the TAUR Lab (Text Analysis, Understanding, and Reasoning) at UT Austin advised by Greg Durrett. I have been fortunate to work with Ying Ding from UT iSchool, Yifan Peng from Weill Cornell Medicine and Justin F. Rousseau from UT Southwestern Medical Center (alphabetical order).

My research focuses on the automatic evaluations of LLMs, with an emphasis on hallucination detection. I developed MiniCheck, a state-of-the-art model for detecting hallucinations in LLM outputs. More recently, my interests have expanded to post-training techniques for strengthening the reasoning capabilities of LLMs and LVLMs, particularly through agent-style approaches where models interact with their environment and incorporate feedback to improve reasoning.

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Selected Papers

ChartMuseum: Testing Visual Reasoning Capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models
Liyan Tang, Grace Kim, Xinyu Zhao, Thom Lake, Wenxuan Ding, Fangcong Yin, Prasann Singhal, Manya Wadhwa, Zeyu Leo Liu, Zayne Sprague, Ramya Namuduri, Bodun Hu, Juan Diego Rodriguez, Puyuan Peng, Greg Durrett
Proceedings of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2025

MiniCheck: Efficient Fact-Checking of LLMs on Grounding Documents

Liyan Tang, Philippe Laban, Greg Durrett
Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2024

TofuEval: Evaluating Hallucinations of LLMs on Topic-Focused Dialogue Summarization

Liyan Tang, Igor Shalyminov, Amy Wing-mei Wong, Jon Burnsky, Jake W. Vincent, Yu’an Yang, Siffi Singh, Song Feng, Hwanjun Song, Hang Su, Lijia Sun, Yi Zhang, Saab Mansour, Kathleen McKeown
Proceedings of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistic (NAACL), 2024

Understanding Factual Errors in Summarization: Errors, Summarizers, Datasets, Error Detectors

Liyan Tang, Tanya Goyal, Alexander R. Fabbri, Philippe Laban, Jiacheng Xu, Semih Yavuz, Wojciech Kryściński, Justin F. Rousseau, Greg Durrett
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2023

Evaluating Large Language Models on Medical Evidence Summarization \
Liyan Tang, Zhaoyi Sun, Betina Idnay, Jordan G Nestor, Ali Soroush, Pierre A. Elias, Ziyang Xu, Ying Ding, Greg Durrett, Justin Rousseau, Chunhua Weng, Yifan Peng
npj Digital Medicine, 2023

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News

06/02/2025: Research Intern at Google DeepMind, CA.
06/03/2024: Research Intern at Bespoke Labs (startup), CA.
12/16/2023: Completed my Master of Science degree in Computer Science at UT Austin.
05/15/2023: Applied Scientist Internship at Amazon AWS AI, WA.
08/25/2021: Started my PhD at UT Austin.
05/14/2021: Completed my Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics at UT Austin.