I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Yale advised by Arman Cohan, where my research focuses on the intersection of natural language processing and reasoning. I’m passionate about building systems that can think more intelligently and communicate their reasoning — whether through natural or symbolic language. My research has been supported by Yale Graduate Fellowship, a Meta research grant and a Salesforce research grant.
At Yale, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with inspiring researchers on projects like FOLIO, P-FOLIO, HYBRIDMIND, and Scheherazade which aim to push the limits of how AI understands logic and context. Our work has gained recognition in both academic and industry circles. Outside of research, I’ve deeply enjoyed mentoring students, organizing conferences and workshops, and contributing to a more inclusive computer science community.
Previously, I interned at Google DeepMind and AWS, where I worked with fantastic teams to advance reasoning capabilities in large language models. I believe that powerful AI should also be transparent, interpretable, and aligned with human values.
I am fortunate to be supported by my wonderful thesis committee and collaborators in my academic journey:
- Denny Zhou, founder and lead of the Reasoning Team at Google DeepMind.
- R. Thomas McCoy, from the Department of Linguistics at Yale.
- Scott J. Shapiro, Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy.
- Ruzica Piskac, leader of the Rigorous Software Engineering (ROSE) group at Yale.
I completed my B.Eng Computer Science degree in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where I worked with Shafiq Rayhan Joty on text generation and summarization.
At NTU, I was awarded the Best Final Year Thesis Gold Medal.
Beyond academics, I enjoy portrait photography and have held multiple sessions for the Yale graduate and undergraduate communities. I also had the privilege of performing in an ensemble at Yale’s historic Woolsey Hall.
Recent talks
Advancing Reasoning in Large Language Models: from Fundamentals to Real-World Applications. Invited talk at CMU, April 2025.
Advancing Reasoning in Large Language Models: from Fundamentals to Real-World Applications. Invited talk at UCSD, Nov 2024.
Advancing Reasoning in Large Language Models: from Fundamentals to Real-World Applications. Thesis prospectus talk at Yale, May 2024.
Selected Publications
- Creativity or Brute Force? Using Brainteasers as a Window into the Problem-Solving Abilities of Large Language Models
Simeng Han, Stephen Xia, Grant Zhang, Howard Dai, Chen Liu, Lichang Chen, Hoang Huy Nguyen, Hongyuan Mei, Jiayuan Mao, R. Thomas McCoy - Learning to Reason via Mixture-of-Thoughts for Logical Reasoning
Tong Zheng*, Lichang Chen*, Simeng Han, R. Thomas McCoy, and Heng Huang - HYBRIDMIND: Meta Selection of Natural Language and Symbolic Language for Enhanced LLM Reasoning
Simeng (Sophia) Han*, Tianyu Liu*, Chuhan Li*, Xuyuan Xiong, Arman Cohan - ATEB: Evaluating and Improving Advanced NLP Tasks for Text Embedding Models
Simeng (Sophia) Han, Frank Palma Gomez, Tu Vu, Zefei Li, Daniel Cer, Hansi Zeng, Chris Tar, Arman Cohan, Gustavo Hernandez Abrego - Towards Artificial Intelligence Research Assistant for Expert-Involved Learning
Tianyu Liu*, Simeng Han*, Xiao Luo, Hanchen Wang, Pan Lu, Biqing Zhu, Yuge Wang, Keyi Li, Jiapeng Chen, Rihao Qu, Yufeng Liu, Xinyue Cui, Aviv Yaish, Yuhang Chen, Minsheng Hao, Chuhan Li, Kexing Li, Arman Cohan, Hua Xu, Mark Gerstein, James Zou, Hongyu Zhao - Meta-Reasoner: Dynamic Guidance for Optimized Inference-time Reasoning in Large Language Models
Yuan Sui, Yufei He, Tri Cao, Simeng (Sophia) Han, Bryan Hooi - FOLIO: Natural Language Reasoning with First-Order Logic
Simeng (Sophia) Han, Hailey Schoelkopf, Yilun Zhao, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, James Coady, David Peng, Yujie Qiao, Luke Benson, Lucy Sun, Alex Wardle-Solano, Hannah Szabo, Ekaterina Zubova, Matthew Burtell, Jonathan Fan, Yixin Liu, Brian Wong, Malcolm Sailor, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Jungo Kasai, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Alexander R. Fabbri, Wojciech Kryscinski, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Xi Victoria Lin, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan, Dragomir Radev
EMNLP 2024 - P-FOLIO: Evaluating and Improving Logical Reasoning with Abundant Human-Written Reasoning Chains
Simeng (Sophia) Han, Aaron Yu, Rui Shen, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, Yujie Qiao, Yilun Zhao, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan
EMNLP 2024 - Scheherazade: Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Math Reasoning in LLMs with Chain-of-Problems
Stephen Miner, Yoshiki Takashima, Simeng (Sophia) Han, Ferhat Erata, Timos Antonopoulos, Ruzica Piskac, Scott J Shapiro - GraphIC: A Graph-Based In-Context Example Retrieval Model For Multi-Step Reasoning
Jiale Fu, Yaqing Wang, Simeng (Sophia) Han, Jiaming Fan, Chen Si, Xu Yang - Optimizing Language Model’s Reasoning Abilities with Weak Supervision
Yongqi Tong, Sizhe Wang, Dawei Li, Yifan Wang, Simeng (Sophia) Han, Zi Lin, Chengsong Huang, Jiaxin Huang, Jingbo Shang - Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization
Yixin Liu, Alexander R. Fabbri, Jiawen Chen, Yilun Zhao, Simen (Sophia)g Han, Shafiq Joty, Pengfei Liu, Dragomir Radev, Chien-Sheng Wu, Arman Cohan
NAACL 2024 - Straight to the Gradient: Learning to Use Novel Tokens for Neural Text Generation
Xiang Lin, Simeng (Sophia) Han, Shafiq Joty
ICML’21 (as long talk ~3%) - Improving Zero and Few-Shot Abstractive Summarization with Intermediate Fine-tuning and Data Augmentation
Alexander Fabbri, Simeng (Sophia) Han, Haoyuan Li, Haoran Li, Marjan Ghazvininejad, Shafiq Joty, Dragomir Radev, Yashar Mehdad
NAACL’21 - Resurrecting Submodularity for Neural Text Generation
Simeng (Sophia) Han*, Xiang Lin* and Shafiq Joty
Awards
- Meta Research Grant 2024 on Complex Reasoning.
- SM2 Scholarship, a full scholarship issued by Ministry of Education and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
- National Physics Olympiad Second Prize, China.
- Terrainier NUS Hackathon Top-8
- Climate Oracle Yale-NUS hack4climate Datathon 2nd Place in the Data Science Category
- Blinkception NTU Hackathon 2nd Prize
Services and Organization
- General Chair: New England NLP (NENLP) 2025.
- Session Chair: BoF session on Complex Reasoning with LLMs at NAACL 2025.
- Organizing Committee: Yale AI4Research Meeting Seminar.
- Ogannizing Committee: Automatic Summarization for Creative Writing Workshop at COLING 22
- Reviewer: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML.
- Teaching fellow: Topics in Natural Language Processing”, “AI Foundation Models”.
- Member: Yale Women in School of Engineering & Applied Science
Mentorship
If you are interested in collaborating with me, please complete the Recuriting Task and drop me an email!
- Current: Frank Li (Yale CS & Math)
- Past: Zhenting Qi (now at Harvard Data Science), Hailey Schoelkopf (now at Anthropic), Wenfei Zhou (now at Nvidia)
Miscellaneous
- I was a student of the wonderful Dragomir Radev.
- Book list: Thinking Like a Lawyer by Frederick Schauer, Elements of Law, an Introduction to Metaphysics.
- I have lived in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Los Angeles, Singapore, New Haven, New York, Mountain View, San Diego, Palo Alto and Redwood City.
- Open Source Society Technical Director, Hackers for Charity Subcommittee