Hankun Lin

PhD Student @ Department of Computer Science, Purdue University

Hankun Lin

About Me

I am a first-year PhD student at Purdue University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Professor Ruqi Zhang. Prior to Purdue, I received my B.S. degree from Nanjing University, where I worked closely with Changjiang Gao and Professor Shujian Huang. During my undergrad studies, I also spent a wonderful semester at UC Berkeley as an exchange student.

My research focuses on understanding and improving neural language systems. I am particularly interested in developing more efficient, capable, and reliable language models, with the goal of advancing both our theoretical understanding of these systems and their practical impact on real-world applications.

Publications

* indicates equal contribution

NeurIPS2026

SEED: Self-Speculative Decoding via Implicit Encoder-Decoder

Hankun Lin*, Patrick Pynadath*, Ruqi Zhang.

UAI2026

Gradient-Guided Reward Optimization for Inference-time Alignment

Hankun Lin, Ruqi Zhang.

EMNLP2025 · long papers

Understanding LLMs' Cross-Lingual Context Retrieval: How Good It Is And Where It Comes From

Changjiang Gao, Hankun Lin, Xin Huang, Xue Han, Junlan Feng, Chao Deng, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang