Research
What we work on. The full paper list is on the Publications page and on Google Scholar.
We work toward AI systems that stay reliable and efficient for diverse people, languages, and real-world settings — increasingly settings where many agents act alongside each other and alongside us. About as much of the work goes into understanding why today's systems fall short as into building ones that don't:
- Multilingual & Multicultural LLMs — understanding how multilinguality works inside a model, and building ones whose competence holds up outside English, in text and in speech
- Collective Intelligence — what populations of AI agents do when they act among each other and with people, e.g., which norms emerge, and whether diversity survives the group
- Efficiency & Mechanism — what capability costs, and where inside a model it actually lives
- Evaluation => Improvement — a static benchmark says little about a system that acts; we work on evaluation that is dynamic and automatic, and on turning what it finds back into a signal that improves the model
Multilingual & Multicultural LLMs
Two overviews: an AAAI 2026 talk on the research agenda, and a podcast conversation (2025) on open models.
- Language of Thought — the language(s) a model thinks in shapes how diverse its outputs are ACL 2026
- Abstract Thought — evidence that LLMs reason in a space beyond any single language NeurIPS 2025
- Language vs. Culture — separating the two, which multilingual evaluation routinely conflates ACL 2025
- How LLMs Handle Multilingualism — the internal pathway a multilingual query actually takes through a model NeurIPS 2024
- Multilingual Jailbreak — safety alignment does not survive the trip into lower-resource languages ICLR 2024
Open models and benchmarks from this line:
Collective Intelligence
- Value Diversity — treating value pluralism as a property of the collective, not of one model/agent arXiv 2026
- What Should Agents Say? — action-state communication for efficient multi-agent systems arXiv 2026
- MoltNet — emerging social behavior of AI agents in an agent-native network COLM 2026
- MASim — multilingual agent-based simulation for social science COLM 2026
Efficiency & Mechanism
- PEAR — rewarding reasoning by phase entropy, so models think only where it pays ICLR 2026
- Difficulty–Diversity Filtering — selecting the fine-tuning data that is actually worth training on ICLR 2026
- Parameter Specialization — how knowledge gets localized inside the weights NeurIPS 2025
- Custom Pruning — turning a general LLM into a compact domain/language/task expert ACL Findings 2025
- Safety Neurons — locating the small set of neurons that carry safety behavior ICLR 2025
Evaluation => Improvement
- DR-Arena — fully automated evaluation for deep research agents ACL 2026
- Judging Bias — what breaks when a reasoning model is the one doing the grading COLM 2025
- Auto-Arena — models evaluating models through peer battles, without human votes ACL 2025
Research Grants
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M3-LLM: A Holistic Framework for Multilingual, Multicultural and Multimodal LLMs
Sole PI. NRF Fellowship. SGD 2.89M. Jul 2026 – Jun 2031. -
Culturally-Aware Proactive Conversational AI for Enhancing Social Resilience in Singapore
PI. AI Singapore Research-Governance Joint Grant. SGD 1.02M. Jan 2026 – Dec 2028. -
Development of Compact and Operationally Tuned Large Language Model
PI. HTX. SGD 1.50M. Sep 2025 – Sep 2026. -
Towards Linguistically Inclusive and Computationally Efficient Large Language Models
Sole PI. SUTD Assistant Professorship (SAP) Award. SGD 500K. May 2025 – May 2028. -
LLM Architecture-Language Nexus: A Unified Analysis Framework
Co-PI. National Multi-Modal LLM Programme. SGD 4.9M (programme total). Apr 2025 – Mar 2028.
Awards & Recognition
- SAC Highlight Award, ACL 2026 (for DR-Arena)
- National Research Foundation (NRF) Fellow, 2026
- Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia, 2026
- AAAI New Faculty Highlight, 2026
- World's Top 2% Scientists, Stanford & Elsevier, 2025
- SUTD Assistant Professorship (SAP) Award, 2025
- Alibaba Star (阿里星), Alibaba Group, 2022