Hongzhan Lin

Hongzhan Lin

Research Fellow at NUS working on trustworthy NLP, multimodal reasoning, and social computing.

Hongzhan Lin

☀️About Me

I am Hongzhan Lin (林鸿展), a Research Fellow at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community (CTIC), National University of Singapore. I work closely with Prof. Mong-Li Lee (Director of CTIC), Prof. Wynne Hsu (Director of IDS), and Prof. Tat-Seng Chua (Director of NExT++).

I received my PhD from the NLP Group at Hong Kong Baptist University in 2026, advised by Prof. Jing Ma. From 2024 to 2025, I was a visiting PhD student at the NExT++ Research Centre at NUS under the guidance of Prof. Tat-Seng Chua.

Before that, I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the PRIS Lab at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in 2019 and 2022, advised by Prof. Guang Chen. Earlier in my career, I worked as an NLP research intern at Tencent AI Lab.

🔬Research Interests

My work focuses on reliable and interpretable AI systems for language, multimodal content, and online communities.

  • Trustworthy Language Models: Dynamic fact-checking, model evaluation, and methods that make language-model decisions more accountable.
  • Multimodal Reasoning: Reasoning across text and images to understand nuanced, implicit, and potentially harmful online content.
  • Social Computing: Computational approaches to misinformation, rumors, and the dynamics of information in online communities.

📢Current Highlights

  • Latest work: SafeAct: How Tool-Using Agents Fail
  • Community: ACM WebSci ‘27, Web & Registration Chair
  • Opportunities: I welcome collaborations, NUS master and bachelor interns, and visiting PhD students interested in projects at CTIC. Remote collaboration is also welcome.

📚Academic Experience

  • Research Fellow, Centre for Trusted Internet and Community, National University of Singapore [2026 - Present]
  • Visiting PhD Student, NExT++ Research Centre, National University of Singapore [2024 - 2025]
  • PhD in Computer Science, Hong Kong Baptist University [2022 - 2026]
  • Master in Artificial Intelligence, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications [2019 - 2022]

📑Selected Publications

  • “FACT-AUDIT: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Framework for Dynamic Fact-Checking Evaluation of Large Language Models”, ACL 2025. [Paper]
  • “Towards Explainable Harmful Meme Detection through Multimodal Debate between Large Language Models”, WWW 2024 (Oral). [Paper]
  • “Zero-Shot Rumor Detection with Propagation Structure via Prompt Learning”, AAAI 2023. [Paper]
  • “Detect Rumors in Microblog Posts for Low-Resource Domains via Adversarial Contrastive Learning”, NAACL 2022 (Findings). [Paper]
  • “Rumor Detection on Twitter with Claim-Guided Hierarchical Graph Attention Networks”, EMNLP 2021. [Paper]

🏅Honors and Research Support

  • Rising Star Award, BESC (2026)
  • Best Student Paper Nominee, INTERSPEECH (2026)
  • RPg Research Performance Award, HKBU (2023–2025)
  • Outstanding Graduate of Beijing, Beijing Municipal Education Commission (2019)
  • NUS HPC Compute Grant (2026–2027): Causal Integration of Distributed Evidence in Video Models

💁‍♂️Professional Services

  • Conference Organiser: ACM WebSci ‘27 (Web & Registration Chair)
  • Conference Area Chair: ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, AAAI, EACL, AACL
  • Conference Reviewer: ACL, EMNLP, WWW, AAAI, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, NAACL, COLING, ACM MM, IJCAI, ECAI
  • Journal Reviewer: TPAMI, TKDE, TOIS, CL, TOMM, TCSS, TCSVT, TALLIP, JAIR, EAAI, ESWA