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I am a postdoctoral researcher at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, working under the supervision of Prof. Yu Cheng. I earned my PhD through a joint program between Zhejiang University and Westlake University, advised by Prof. Yue Zhang.
Email / Google Scholar / Twitter / Github |
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We are looking for full-time researchers, research interns and joint PhD students (with THU, PKU, SJTU, FDU, etc.) to work on cutting-edge research in large language models. |
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My research focuses on reasoning, trustworthy AI and multilinguality. *: equal contributions. †: project lead or corresponding author. |
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Runzhe Zhan, Yafu Li†, Zhi Wang, Xiaoye Qu, Dongrui Liu, Jing Shao, Derek F. Wong, Yu Cheng preprint Github / Paper Boosting reasoning performance with the model's own experience. |
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Tingchen Fu, Jiawei Gu, Yafu Li†, Xiaoye Qu, Yu Cheng preprint Github / Paper A tension between scaling up reasoning capacity and maintaining controllability. |
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Jianhao Yan*, Yafu Li*†, Zican Hu, Zhi Wang, Ganqu Cui, Xiaoye Qu, Yu Cheng, Yue Zhang NeurIPS, 2025 Github / Paper A RL framework to boost reasoning performance using off-policy guidance. |
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Xiaoye Qu*†, Yafu Li*†, Zhaochen Su, Weigao Sun, Jianhao Yan, Dongrui Liu, Ganqu Cui, Daizong Liu, Shuxian Liang, Junxian He, Peng Li, Wei Wei, Jing Shao, Chaochao Lu, Yue Zhang, Xian-Sheng Hua, Bowen Zhou, Yu Cheng preprint Github / Paper A survey of efficient reasoning for Large Reasoning Models. |
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Yafu Li, Xuyang Hu, Xiaoye Qu, Linjie Li, Yu Cheng ICML, 2025 Github / Paper Test-Time Preference Optimization (TPO) that aligns LLMs during inference via textual feedbacks. |
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Haoran Zhang, Yafu Li†, Xuyang Hu, Dongrui Liu, Zhilin Wang, Bo Li, Yu Cheng preprint Github / Paper Reasoning over safety and behavourial boundaries before answering. |
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Zhilin Wang*, Yafu Li*†, Jianhao Yan, Yu Cheng, Yue Zhang ACL, 2025 Paper Unveiling attractor cycles in LLMs through dynamical systems analysis. |
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Yafu Li, Qintong Li, Leyang Cui, Wei Bi, Longyue Wang, Linyi Yang, Shuming Shi, Yue Zhang ACL, 2024 Github / Paper Assessing the proficiency of machine-generated text detectors amidst real-world scenarios. |
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Yue Zhang, Yafu Li, Leyang Cui, Deng Cai, Lemao Liu, Tingchen Fu, Xinting Huang, Enbo Zhao, Yu Zhang, Yulong Chen, Longyue Wang, Anh Tuan Luu, Wei Bi, Freda Shi, Shuming Shi Computational Linguistics Github / Paper A survey of hallucination in LLMs. |
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Yafu Li*, Ronghao Zhang*, Zhilin Wang, Huajiang Zhang, Leyang Cui, Yongjing Yin, Tong Xiao, Yue Zhang ACL, 2025 Github / Paper A systematic study of the origin of translationese in LLMs and mitigation methods. |
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Yafu Li, Leyang Cui, Jianhao Yan, Yongjing Yin, Wei Bi, Shuming Shi, Yue Zhang ACL, 2023, Best Paper Nomination (1.6%) Github / Paper A neural symbolic method that guides generation with rules. |
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Yafu Li, Leyang Cui, Yongjing Yin, Yue Zhang EMNLP, 2022 Github / Paper Optimizing non-autoregressive translation with multi-granularity policy gradient. |
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Yafu Li, Yongjing Yin, Yulong Chen, Yue Zhang ACL, 2021 Github / Paper Neural machine translation suffers poor compositionality. |
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September 4, 2025 β Invited lecture at Tencent: Evolving Reasoning Abilities of LLMs: RLVR, Off-Policy Learning, and Test-Time Reinforcement Learning August 12, 2025 β Invited speaker at CCL 2025 Forum on Large Model Reasoning and Reinforcement Learning |
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Area Chair: ACL 2025, EMNLP 2025 Conference Reviewer: ACL, EMNLP, COLING, ACL ARR, IJCAI, NeurIPS. Journal Reviewer: TMLR, JAIR, TACL, TASLP, TBD, TALLIP. |
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Outstanding Student Scholarship (Silver medal, Tencent Rhino-Bird Elite Program, 2024). National Scholarship (Ministry of Education, 2023). Dean's Medal (Westlake University, 2023). |
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Website's code is from Jon Barron. |