Qianli Wang

Qianli Wang

PhD Student

Technische Universität Berlin

Research Interests

post-hoc explanations (counterfactual example, free-text rationale)
interactive conversational XAI systems
mechanistic interpretability
explanation faithfulness
multilinguality
evaluation

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About

Hi👋, I'm Qianli Wang and work as a NLP researcher dedicated to advancing the interpretability and explainability of LLMs at Quality and Usability Lab, Technische Universität Berlin under the supervision of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Sebastian Möller, co-supervised by Dr.-Ing. Nils Feldhus.

News

2026-05-22: Two more papers have been submitted on (1) LLM-as-a-Judge circuit discovery, (2) CoT faithfulness meta-evaluation under optimization.

2026-05-21: 💥 Happy to share that our paper "Macro: Enhancing Multilingual Counterfactual Explanations through Alignment-as-Preference Optimization" has been accepted by MeLLM workshop @ ACL 2026 (non-archival).

2026-04-29: Our paper about quantization's effect on factual knowledge recall is finally accepted (Oral) at TrustNLP workshop co-located at ACL 2026!

2026-04-20: One paper led by my thesis student, Yilong, on counterfactual self-explanation enhancement via alignment-as-preference optimization is currently under submission.

2026-04-07: 🌟I am thrilled to shared that two papers are accepted at ACL 2026 about (1) multilingual counterfactual evaluation (Main); (2) actionable mechanistic interpretability survey (Findings)! See you in San Diego 🇺🇸

2026-03-17: 🤖 One co-authored paper in collaboration with Uni Marburg is in submission. We propose SimXAI, a lightweight LLM-centric conversational layer for ConvXAI systems, which enables better interaction quality and human understanding.

2026-01-06: Two first-authored and three co-authored papers in submission about (1) how quantization affects self-explanations❓collaborated with Pepa Atanasova; (2) feedback-driven iterative counterfactual refinement; (3) NLG evaluation trend survey led by Jing Yang; (4) claim-level grounding traceable generation led by Bohao Chu; (5) mechanistic interpretability application survey led by Hengyuan Zhang.

News Archive

Selected Publications

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Parallel Universes, Parallel Languages: A Comprehensive Study on LLM-based Multilingual Counterfactual Example Generation

Qianli Wang, Van Bach Nguyen, Yihong Liu, Fedor Splitt, Nils Feldhus, Christin Seifert, Hinrich Schütze, Sebastian Möller, Vera Schmitt

ACL

Cross-Refine: Improving Natural Language Explanation Generation by Learning in Tandem

Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Nils Feldhus, Simon Ostermann, Sebastian Möller, Vera Schmitt

COLING

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 Dr.-Ing. 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 🧑‍💻

2026.09 - 2027.03: Applied Scientist Intern @ Amazon, Berlin, Germany.

2026.06 - 2026.08: Applied Scientist Intern @ Hithink RoyalFlush, Hangzhou, China.

2024.07 - 2026.06: NLP Researcher @ Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany; funded by VERANDA project.

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.