Chi Han 韩迟

Chi Han is a PhD candidate at UIUC CS, advised by Prof. Heng Ji. Previously, he obtained his Bachelor's degree from YaoClass, Tsinghua University. Expected graduation in June 2026.

[Twitter]; [Google Scholar]; [GitHub]; [Curriculum Vitae];
My Research

My long-term research goal is to develop the science of language models (LMs) by asking and answering the following questions: What role does each hidden representation play in LLMs? When will they malfunction or cause counterintuitive phenomena? How can we adapt the mechanisms to transcend their inherent limits and better serve the downstream tasks? To this end, I have been working on a theoretical and empirical analysis of LLM hidden representations LMs, with the aim to provide insights and develop useful tools and cures for LMs.

I am on the academic job market for Fall 2026. If you are interested in my research and would like to discuss potential faculty positions, please feel free to reach out to me via email at chihan3 [at] illinois [dot] edu.

Awards and Honors
News, Service and Experiences
Publications ( show selected / show all by date )
Understanding Emergent In-Context Learning from a Kernel Regression Perspective
Chi Han, Ziqi Wang, Han Zhao, Heng Ji

TMLR 2025, Paper

mCLM: A Function-Infused and Synthesis-Friendly Modular Chemical Language Model
Carl Edwards*, Chi Han*, Gawon Lee, Thao Nguyen, Bowen Jin, Chetan Kumar Prasad, Sara Szymkuć, Bartosz A. Grzybowski, Ying Diao, Jiawei Han, Ge Liu, Hao Peng, Martin D. Burke, Heng Ji

ArXiv Preprint

Computation Mechanism Behind LLM Position Generalization
Chi Han, Heng Ji

ACL 2025, Paper

Eliminating Position Bias of Language Models: A Mechanistic Approach
Ziqi Wang, Hanlin Zhang, Xiner Li, Kuan-Hao Huang, Chi Han, Shuiwang Ji, Sham M. Kakade, Hao Peng, Heng Ji

ICLR 2025, Paper, Twitter

Can Language Models Follow Multiple Turns of Entangled Instructions?
Chi Han,

EMNLP 2025 Findings, Homepage, Paper, Github Repository, HuggingFace Dataset

LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models
Chi Han, Qifan Wang, Hao Peng, Wenhan Xiong, Hugo Chan, Heng Ji, Sinong Wang

NAACL 2024 (Outstanding Paper Award), Paper, Codes, Video

LM-Steer: Word Embeddings Are Steers for Language Models
Chi Han, Jialiang Xu, Manling Li, Yi Ren Fung, Chenkai Sun, Nan Jiang, Tarek Abdelzaher, Heng Ji

ACL 2024 (Outstanding Paper Award), Paper, Codes, HuggingFace Live Demo, Slides, Poster

LISA: Layerwise Importance Sampling for Memory-Efficient Large Language Model Fine-Tuning
Rui Pan, Xiang Liu, Shizhe Diao, Renjie Pi, Jipeng Zhang, Chi Han, Tong Zhang

NeurIPS 2024, Paper, Codes

Large Language Models on Graphs: A Comprehensive Survey
Bowen Jin, Gang Liu, Chi Han, Meng Jiang, Heng Ji, Jiawei Han,

TKDE, Paper, Github Repo: "Awesome Language Model on Graphs"

CREATOR: Disentangling Abstract and Concrete Reasonings of Large Language Models through Tool Creation
Cheng Qian, Chi Han, Yi Ren Fung, Yujia Qin, Zhiyuan Liu, Heng Ji,

EMNLP Findings, Paper, Codes

Understanding the Effect of Data Augmentation on Knowledge Distillation
Ziqi Wang, Chi Han, Wenxuan Bao, Heng Ji

ArXiv, Paper

Logical Entity Representation in Knowledge-Graphs for Differentiable Rule Learning
Chi Han, Qizheng He, Charles Yu, Xinya Du, Tonghang Hang, Heng Ji

ICLR 2023, Paper, Codes

Zero-Shot Classification by Logical Reasoning on Natural Language Explanations
Chi Han, Hengzhi Pei, Xinya Du, Heng Ji

ACL 2023 Findings, Paper, Codes

Learning Shared Semantic Space for Speech-to-Text Translation
Chi Han, Mingxuan Wang, Lei Li, Heng Ji

ACL 2021 Findings, Paper, Codes

Visual Concept-Metaconcept Learning
Chi Han*, Jiayuan Mao*, Chuang Gan, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, Jiajun Wu,

NeurIPS 2019, Paper, Codes, Project Page