Google Scholar  |  liyixia@me.com  |  liyixia.me

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), supervised by Dr. Guanhua Chen. I am currently a research intern with Tencent Hunyuan Team. Prior to this, I interned at Microsoft Research Asia and Huawei.

Research Interests

• Agentic Learning — Experiential Learning (From Word to World)
• LLM Post-training — LLM Reasoning (SPPO, CFT); Multi-Modal & Multi-lingual (LayAlign, VFA)
• Efficient Methods in LLMs — Low-Rank Adaptation (MiLoRA, SeTAR); Model Merging & Quantization (VFA, ImPart); Model Routing (RouterXBench); Decoding Methods (G2)

News

• 2026.06 — We are excited to release our survey on Text World Models for LLM-based Agents!
• 2026.05 — I started my research internship with Tencent Hunyuan Team.
• 2026.05 - Three first-authored papers were selected as oral presentations at ACL 2026 🌟.
• 2026.05 — 1 paper accepted to ICML 2026. Congratulations to all authors 🎉.
• 2026.04 — 5 papers accepted to ACL 2026 Main Track. See you in San Diego 🎉.
• 2026.01 — 2 papers accepted to ICLR 2026. Congratulations to all authors 🎉.

* denotes equal contribution. Full list on Google Scholar.

2026

• Bridging the Agent-World Gap: Text World Models for LLM-based Agents
  Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Peng Lai, Zhiwen Ruan, He Zhu, Youxin Zhu, Ganlong Zhao, Minda Hu, Yun Chen, Sibei Yang, Peng Li, Jeff Z. Pan, Jia Pan, Guanhua Chen, Yang Liu, Guanbin Li
  Under Review, 2026 [paper][code]

• From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models?
  Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu, Zhenfei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Cheng Qian, Zeping Li, Pony Ma, Guanhua Chen, Heng Ji
  ACL Main, 2026 [Oral, Top10%][paper][code]

• VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation
  Yixia Li*, Yaqing Shi*, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
  ACL Main, 2026 [Oral, Top10%]

• SPPO: Sequence-Level PPO for Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks
  Tianyi Wang*, Yixia Li*, Long Li, Yibiao Chen, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
  ACL Main, 2026 [Oral, Top10%][paper][code]

• Enhancing Large Language Model Reasoning via Selective Critical Token Fine-Tuning
  Zhiwen Ruan, Yixia Li, He Zhu, Yun Chen, Peng Li, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
  Under Review, 2026 [paper]

• Towards Fair and Comprehensive Evaluation of Routers in Collaborative LLM Systems
  Wanxing Wu*, He Zhu*, Yixia Li*, Lei Yang, Zhao Jiehui, Hongru Wang, Jian Yang, Benyou Wang, Bingyi Jing, Guanhua Chen
  Under Review, 2026 [paper][code]

2025

• G2: Guided Generation for Enhanced Output Diversity in LLMs
  Zhiwen Ruan, Yixia Li, Yefeng Liu, Yun Chen, Weihua Luo, Peng Li, Yang Liu, Guanhua Chen
  EMNLP Main, 2025 [paper][code]

• ImPart: Importance-Aware Delta-Sparsification for Improved Model Compression and Merging in LLMs
  Yan Yang*, Yixia Li*, Hongru Wang, Xuetao Wei, James Jianqiao Yu, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen
  ACL Main, 2025 [paper][code]

• MiLoRA: Harnessing Minor Singular Components for Parameter-Efficient LLM Finetuning
  Hanqing Wang, Yixia Li, Shuo Wang, Guanhua Chen, Yun Chen
  NAACL Main, 2025 [paper][code]

• LayAlign: Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning in Large Language Models via Layer-Wise Adaptive Fusion and Alignment Strategy
  Zhiwen Ruan*, Yixia Li*, He Zhu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen
  NAACL Findings, 2025 [paper][code]

2024

• SeTAR: Out-of-Distribution Detection with Selective Low-Rank Approximation
  Yixia Li*, Boya Xiong*, Guanhua Chen, Yun Chen
  NeurIPS, 2024 [paper][code]

• UniPoll: A Unified Social Media Poll Generation Framework via Multi-Objective Optimization
  Yixia Li, Rong Xiang, Yanlin Song, Jing Li
  TNNLS, 2024 [paper][code]

• [2026.05 - Now] Tencent | Hunyuan Team
  Mentor: Dr. Zenan Xu & Dr. Mingda Hu
  LLM Post Training, Agentic Learning

• [2025.06 - 2026.05] Microsoft Research Asia | GenAI Group
  Mentor: Dr. Dongdong Zhang
  Efficient Large Language Models, Agentic Learning

• [2022.08 - 2023.07] PolyU | SMART Lab
  Mentor: Prof. Jing Li
  Social Media Opinion Polling, Cantonese Medical Dialogue System

• [2022.06 - 2022.08] Huawei
  Mentor: Jingyuan Yang
  Extractive Document Q&A, Knowledge-enhanced Dialogue System, Chinese ASR Entity Correction

• [2023 - 2027] Southern University of Science and Technology
  Ph.D. in Mathematics｜Supervisor: Dr. Guanhua Chen

• [2021 - 2023] The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
  M.Sc. in Computer Science with Distinction
  

• [2017 - 2021] Guangzhou University
  B.Sc. in Statistics
  

Reviewer for

• NeurIPS (Top Reviewer in 2025)
• ICML
• ICLR
• ARR (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL)
• Neural Networks
• TNNLS
• NLPCC

Teaching Assistant for

• STA5007: Advanced Natural Language Processing
• STA323: Big Data Analysis Software and Application

Invited Talks

• 2026.03 — Talk at MLNLP: LLMs as Implicit Text-based World Models

• [2025.10] NeurIPS Top Reviewer, Top 8%
• [2025.10] National Scholarship, Top 1%, Southern University of Science and Technology
• [2025.10] Outstanding Student, Top 5%, Southern University of Science and Technology
• [2023.09] Dean's Honors List, Top 5%, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
• [2020.12] National Scholarship, Top 1%, Guangzhou University
• [2020.11] Outstanding Student, Top 5%, Guangzhou University