πŸ‘‹ About Me

I am a first year Statistics and Data Science PhD student at UCLA, advised by Prof. Kai-Wei Chang and Prof. Ying Nian Wu. Before that, I earned my M.S. in Data Science from Tsinghua University and B.S. in Electronic Engineering from Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU). Currently, I'm a research intern at Microsoft AI Superintelligence Team, working with Dr. Yeyun Gong and Dr. Weizhu Chen. My research interests lie in large language models (LLMs) and agentic post-training.

πŸ”₯ News

  • 2026.08: Β  πŸŽ‰ Our paper NSDS has been accepted by EMNLP 2026.
  • 2026.07: Β  πŸŽ‰ Our paper Agent Q-Mix has been accepted by COLM 2026.
  • 2026.04: Β  πŸŽ‰ Eight papers (Including DAC, HAGeo, and TL;DR) have been accepted by ACL 2026.
  • 2026.01: Β  πŸŽ‰ Two papers SvS and RLVR Incentivizes Correct Reasoning have been accepted by ICLR 2026.
  • 2025.09: Β  πŸŽ‰ Our paper SwS has been accepted by Neurips 2025.
  • 2025.09: Β  πŸŽ‰ Our paper GuiLoMo has been accepted by EMNLP 2025.
  • 2025.09: Β  πŸŽ“οΈ Start my PhD research journey at UCLA.
  • 2025.05: Β  πŸŽ“ Graduated from my Master’s program at Tsinghua University. Thanks to all my advisors and friends!

πŸ“– Education

  • Sep. 2025 - Present Ph.D., Statistics and Data Science, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
  • Sep. 2022 - Jun. 2025 M.Sc., Data Science and Information Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
  • Sep. 2018 - Jun. 2022 B.Sc., Electronic Information Science and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China.

πŸ§‘β€πŸ’» Experience

  • (Jun. 2026 - Sep. 2026) Research Intern, Microsoft AI Superintelligence.
    Mentor: Yeyun Gong, Paul Mineiro, Weizhu Chen
    • Self-improving coding agents by generating more compact, higher-quality trajectories.
  • (Nov. 2023 - May 2026) Research Intern, Microsoft Research & CoreAI.
    Mentor: Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Weizhu Chen
    • Pre-training and continual learning for large language models (LLMs).
    • Data-centric reinforcement learning for enhancing LLM reasoning.
  • (Mar. 2023 - Sep. 2023) Research Intern, AI Lab, Tencent Inc., Shenzhen, China.
    Mentor: Pengyu Cheng
    • Utilizing reinforcement learning for long sequence modeling in Transformers.
    • Dialog generation and task-specific instruction data generation.

πŸ“‘ Selected Publications

ICLR 2026
SvS

Beyond Pass@1: Self-Play With Variational Problem Synthesis Sustains RLVR

Xiao Liang*, Zhong-Zhi Li*, Yeyun Gong, Yelong Shen, Ying Nian Wu, Zhijiang Guo, Weizhu Chen

Code Project Page

We propose an online Self-play with Variational Problem Synthesis strategy for RLVR training that iteratively leverages model responses to synthesize variational problems for augmentation.

ACL 2026
SwS

Training LLMs for Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning Elevates Test-Time Scalability

Xiao Liang, Zhong-Zhi Li, Zhenghao Lin, Eric Hancheng Jiang, Hengyuan Zhang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Yeyun Gong, Weizhu Chen

Code

We introduce an end-to-end RL framework to endow LLMs with divide-and-conquer reasoning capabilities, enabling a higher performance ceiling and stronger test-time scalability.

Neurips 2025
SwS

SwS: Self-aware Weakness-driven Problem Synthesis in Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning

Xiao Liang*, Zhong-Zhi Li*, Yeyun Gong, Yang Wang, Hengyuan Zhang, Yelong Shen, Ying Nian Wu, Weizhu Chen

Code Project Page

We introduce a Self-aware Weakness-driven Problem Synthesis framework that identifies and leverages model weaknesses for problem augmentation in RLVR.

ACL 2026
HAGeo

Gold-Medal-Level Olympiad Geometry Solving with Efficient Heuristic Auxiliary Constructions

Boyan Duan, Xiao Liang, Shuai Lu, Yaoxiang Wang, Yelong Shen, Kai-Wei Chang, Ying Nian Wu, Mao Yang, Weizhu Chen, Yeyun Gong

Code Benchmark

We present a highly efficient geometry theorem proving method that runs entirely on CPUs and achieves gold-medal-level performance on IMO problems.

ACL 2026
TLDR

TL;DR: Too Long, Do Re-weighting for Efficient LLM Reasoning Compression

Zhong-Zhi Li*, Xiao Liang*, Zihao Tang, Lei Ji, Peijie Wang, Haotian Xu, Xing W, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Yeyun Gong, Ying Nian Wu, Zhijiang Guo, Xiao Liu, Fei Yin, Cheng-Lin Liu

Code

We propose a dynamic ratio-based training pipeline that balances System-1 and System-2 data to reduce redundant reasoning in LLMs.

ICLR 2026
RLVR

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Implicitly Incentivizes Correct Reasoning in Base LLMs

Xumeng Wen*, Zihan Liu*, Shun Zheng*, Zhijian Xu, Shengyu Ye, Zhirong Wu, Xiao Liang, Yang Wang, Junjie Li, Ziming Miao, Jiang Bian, Mao Yang

We introduce a stricter reasoning-aware metric beyond pass@k and show that RLVR uniquely incentivizes logically consistent reasoning.

ICLR 2025
Integrative Decoding

Integrative Decoding: Improve Factuality via Implicit Self-consistency

Yi Cheng, Xiao Liang, Yeyun Gong, Wen Xiao, Song Wang, Yuji Zhang, Wenjun Hou, Kaishuai Xu, Wenge Liu, Wenjie Li, Jian Jiao, Qi Chen, Peng Cheng, Wayne Xiong

Code

We present a self-consistency based decoding strategy that improves factual accuracy in long-form generation.

EMNLP 2024
TRAIT

Task Oriented In-Domain Data Augmentation

Xiao Liang*, Xinyu Hu*, Simiao Zuo, Yeyun Gong, Qiang Lou, Yi Liu, Shao-Lun Huang, Jian Jiao

We propose a task-oriented in-domain data augmentation framework consisting of in-domain data selection and task-specific synthesis.

ACL 2025
Chain-of-Reasoning

Chain-of-Reasoning: Towards Unified Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models via a Multi-Paradigm Perspective

Yiyao Yu, Yuxiang Zhang, Dongdong Zhang, Xiao Liang, Hengyuan Zhang, Xingxing Zhang, Ziyi Yang, Mahmoud Khademi, Hany Awadalla, Junjie Wang, Yujiu Yang, Furu Wei

We introduce a unified framework that integrates natural language, algorithmic, and symbolic reasoning for mathematical problem solving.

πŸ† Honors and Awards

  • Graduate Dean’s Scholar Award (GDSA, Amount: $14,500), UCLA, California, 2025
  • Outstanding Master Graduate Thesis, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 2025
  • Second Prize Scholarship, Tsinhua University, Beijing, 2024
  • Outstanding Graduate Thesis, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, 2022
  • Outstanding Graduate Student, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, 2022
  • Second Prize Scholarship, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangdong, 2019~2022
  • 1st of the 2022 Tsinghua Open Hack Competition - Multimodal Learning Track, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 2022