Hi👋, I’m Qianli Wang and work as a NLP researcher dedicated to advancing the interpretability and explainability of LLMs at XplainNLP group, Quality and Usability Lab, Technische Universität Berlin under the supervision of Sebastian Möller.
Research interests 👀
Topics of interest are post-hoc explanations (especially counterfactual example, free-text rationale), interactive conversational XAI systems, mechanistic interpretability, reasoning, multilinguality, evaluation, alignment.
News ✨
2025-05-19: 💫 Three first-authored papers in submission about (1) multilingual explanation request parsing and custom input extraction in ConvXAI; (2) counterfactual validity evaluation for counterfactual data augmentation; (3) how does quantization affect model explainability and interpretability.
2025-05-15: The 4th first-authored paper titled FitCF: A Framework for Automatic Feature Importance-guided Counterfactual Example Generation accepted at ACL 2025 Findings, which will be hold in Vienna, Austria! 🍻
2025-05:15 🚥 Thrilled to announce that I will be conducting a research stay in September at the CopeNLU group, led by Isabelle Augenstein, funded by the Danish Data Science Academy (DDSA).
2025-04-29: I gave an invited presentation at Efficient and Explainable NLP (E&E) Group, MLT Lab, DFKI about FitCF paper.
2025-01-15: 🎉 Exciting News from AI Founder Fellowship Program: I’m glad to announce that I have received funding granted by German Academy of Technical Sciences (acatech) and Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport (BMDV), supporting PhD students with up to 32 Mio. Euro over 9 months for their doctoral research projects/start-up ideas.
2024-12-15: I will be at COLING 2025 to present our Cross-Refine paper. See you in Abu Dhabi!
2024-12-11: 🌴 One new paper in submission about feature importance-guided counterfactual example generation (FitCF). The preprint is now available on arXiv!
2024-11-29: The 3rd first-authored paper titled Cross-Refine: Improving Natural Language Explanation Generation by Learning in Tandem accepted at COLING 2025, which will be hold in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates🏜️!
News Archive
Education Background 👨🎓
2024.07-ongoing: Computer Science, Ph.D., Technische Universität Berlin. Supervised by Prof. Dr. Sebastian Möller.
2025.09: Visiting PhD Student, University of Copenhagen. Supervised by Prof. Dr. Isabelle Augenstein.
2021.10-2023.10: Computer Science, M.Sc., Technische Universität Berlin. Supervised by Nils Feldhus and Dr.-Ing. Leonhard Hennig: A Singular LLM is all you need for dialogue-based explanation regarding NLP tasks.
2018.10-2021.09: Computer Science, B.Sc., Freie Universität Berlin. Supervised by Prof. Dr. László Kozma: Understanding and implementation of the algorithm for three-coloring in triangle-free planar graphs.
Jobs 🧑💻
2024.07 - ongoing: NLP Researcher @ Quality and Usability Lab, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany; funded by VERANDA project.
2024.07 - ongoing: Guest Researcher @ German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) - SLT Group, Berlin, Germany.
2024.01 - 2024.05: Machine Learning Researcher @ Aptiv, Wuppertal, Germany.
2023.01 - 2024.01: Research Assistant @ German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) - SLT Group, Berlin, Germany.