Hi I'm Howard!

I'm a Computer Science PhD student at Princeton University, advised by Professor Danqi Chen. Previously, I also obtained my BSE from Princeton in 2023. I'm part of the Princeton Natural Language Processing Group and Princeton Language and Intelligence. I have also spent time at Jane Street, Samaya AI, and Facebook/Meta. You can find a copy of my CV here.

Previously, I have developed long-context and reasoning-intensive benchmarks (HELMET, BRIGHT) as well as long-context language modeling methods (CEPE, ProLong). Recently, I'm particularly excited about long-horizon systems (SLIM) and their foundations–long-context LMs and tool-using agents. Specifically, I'm interested in the dynamics between pre-training and post-training (e.g., reinforcement learning) for long-context LMs with reasoning and tool-use capabilities. Please check out my Google Scholar for a full list of my publications.

In my free time, I like to run, cook, read, and (occasionally) play/do badminton/soccer/BJJ. I also enjoy learning languages—am currently studying Taiwanese (台語) and Japanese (日本語).

Contact

If you are interested in chatting about research, feel free to reach out at hyen [at] cs [dot] princeton [dot] edu