YIXIA LI Ph.D.

Education

Southern University of Science and Technology
Shenzhen, China
Ph.D. in Mathematics
2023 - 2027
  • Supervisor: Dr. Guanhua Chen.
  • Research Area: Efficient Methods in LLMs, LLM Post-training, Agentic Learning.
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hong Kong, China
M.Sc. in Computer Science with Distinction
2021 - 2023
  • Rank: Top 5%, GPA: 3.8/4.0.
Guangzhou University
Guangzhou, China
B.Sc. in Statistics
2017 - 2021
  • Rank: Top 5%, GPA: 3.7/4.0.
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Publications

* equal contribution

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, Mengdi Wang
  • Under Review, 2026 [paper][code]
VFA: Empoweing Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation
  • Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei
  • Under Review, 2026
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
  • Under Review, 2026
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
No More Stale Feedback: Co-Evolving Critics for Open-World Agent Learning Systems
  • Zhicong Li, Lingjie Jiang, Yulan Hu, Xingchen Zeng, Yixia Li, Xiangwen Zhang, Guanhua Chen, Zheng Pan, Xin Li, Yong Liu
  • Under Review, 2026 [paper]
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, 2025 [paper]
VisCodex: Unified Multimodal Code Generation via Merging Vision and Coding Models
  • Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Xun Wu, Yixia Li, Dongdong Zhang, Furu Wei
  • Under Review, 2025 [paper][code]
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]
FANNO: Augmenting High-Quality Instruction Data with Open-Sourced LLMs Only
  • He Zhu, Yifan Ding, Yicheng Tao, Zhiwen Ruan, Yixia Li, Wenjia Zhang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen
  • ACL Findings, 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]
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]
PACIT: Unlocking the Power of Examples for Better In-Context Instruction Tuning
  • Tianci Xue, Ziqi Wang, Yixia Li, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen
  • ACL Findings, 2024 [paper][code]
Cantonese Natural Language Processing in the Transformers Era, Survey and Challenges
  • Rong Xiang, Emmanuele Chersoni, Yixia Li, Jing Li, Chu-Ren Huang
  • Journal of Language Resources and Evaluation, 2024 [paper]
Electric Power Grid Invulnerability Under Intentional Edge-Based Attacks
  • Yixia Li, Shudong Li, Yanshan Chen, Peiyan He, Xiaobo Wu, Weihong Han
  • Communications in Computer and Information Science, 2019 [paper]
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Research Experience

Microsoft Research Asia | GenAI
Beijing, China
Mentor: Dr. Dongdong Zhang
2025.06 - Now
  • Efficient Large Language Models
  • Agentic Learning
PolyU | SMART Lab
Hong Kong, China
Mentor: Dr. Jing Li
2022.08 - 2023.07
  • Social Media Opinion Polling
  • Cantonese Medical Dialogue System
Huawei
Shenzhen, China
Mentor: Jingyuan Yang
2022.06 - 2022.08
  • Extractive Document Q&A
  • Knowledge-enhanced Dialogue System
  • Chinese ASR Entity Correction
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Academic Services

Awards and Honors