Me
Hefan Zhang
PhD Candidate, Dartmouth College
hefan.zhang.gr [at] dartmouth.edu
Another me
I enjoy Chinese Calligraphy, playing Pipa, and have a strong appreciation for logic-based puzzle games that emphasize mathematical reasoning, such as Sudoku.

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Dartmouth College, where I am fortunate to be advised by Soroush Vosoughi. My research interests lie in natural language processing, machine learning, interpretability, and the simulation of large language models. I'm always looking for related colaboration and internship opportunities. If you are interested to chat with me, feel free to drop me an email.

Interests

Education

Dartmouth College
Shanghai Jiao Tong University
  • Bachelor in Information Engineering and Mathematics, Sep. 2018 - June. 2022

News

  • Served as a reviewer for ACL Rolling Review (ARR) - Jan 2026.
  • Passed my Ph.D. qualifying examination (RPE) and advanced to candidacy.
  • Served as Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review (ARR) - Oct 2025.
  • Three papers accepted to EMNLP 2025. Thanks to all collaborators!

Publications ( / )

Enhancing LLM-Based Persuasion Simulations with Cultural and Speaker-Specific Information
Weicheng Ma*, Hefan Zhang*, Shiyu Ji, Farnoosh Hashemi, Qichao Wang, Ivory Yang, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
EMNLP 2025 (findings)
[Paper] [Code]
A Generalizable Rhetorical Strategy Annotation Model Using LLM-based Debate Simulation and Labelling
Shiyu Ji*, Farnoosh Hashemi*, Joice Chen, Juanwen Pan, Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Sophia Pan, Ming Cheng, Shubham Mohole, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi, Michael Macy
EMNLP 2025 (findings)
[Paper]
Recontextualizing revitalization: A mixed media approach to reviving the nüshu language
Ivory Yang, Xiaobo Guo, Yuxin Wang, Hefan Zhang, Yaning Jia, William Dinauer, Soroush Vosoughi
EMNLP 2025 (main)
[Paper]
Communication Makes Perfect: Persuasion Dataset Construction via Multi-LLM Communication
Weicheng Ma, Hefan Zhang, Ivory Yang, Shiyu Ji, Joice Chen, Farnoosh Hashemi, Shubham Mohole, Ethan Gearey, Michael Macy, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
NAACL 2025 (oral)
[Paper] [Code]
Efflex: Efficient and flexible pipeline for spatio-temporal trajectory graph modeling and representation learning
Ming Cheng, Ziyi Zhou, Bowen Zhang, Ziyu Wang, Jiaqi Gan, Ziang Ren, Weiqi Feng, Yi Lyu, Hefan Zhang, Xingjian Diao
CVPR 2024 Workshops
[Paper]
Improving Syntactic Probing Correctness and Robustness with Control Tasks
Weicheng Ma, Brian Wang, Hefan Zhang, Lili Wang, Rolando Coto-Solano, Saeed Hassanpour, Soroush Vosoughi
ACL 2023 (main)
[Paper]

GitHub

Persuasion Dataset Generation by Multi-agent LLM framework.
Python
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Persuasion Simulation with Culture Backgrounds by LLM agents.
Python
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Selected Honors & Awards

Academic Services

Peer Reviewer:
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2026
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2025
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2025
Area Chair:
ACL Rolling Review (ARR) - Oct 2025
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