Papers by Zeping Li
From Word to World: Can Large Language Models be Implicit Text-based World Models? (2026.acl-long)
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Yixia Li, Hongru Wang, Jiahao Qiu, Zhenfei Yin, Dongdong Zhang, Cheng Qian, Zeping Li, Xiaoteng Ma, Guanhua Chen, Heng Ji
| Challenge: | Agentic learning increasingly hinges on interaction, yet real-world experience is expensive, limited, and often irreversible at inference time. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that reframes language modeling as next-state prediction under interaction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework evaluates world models in text-based environments . it shows that sufficiently trained models capture coherent environment dynamics . |
Rethinking the Role of Entropy in Optimizing Tool-Use Behaviors for Large Language Model Agents (2026.acl-long)
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Zeping Li, Hongru Wang, Yiwen Zhao, Guanhua Chen, Yixia Li, Keyang Chen, Yixin Cao, Guangnan Ye, Hongfeng Chai, Zhenfei Yin
| Challenge: | Large language models excel in mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering tasks, but in long trajectories, agents often invoke tools excessively or inappropriately, increasing computation cost and derailing the reasoning process. |
| Approach: | They propose to use entropy reduction as a supervisory signal to reduce tool calls . they propose to design two reward strategies to address the needs of optimizing tool-use behavior. |
| Outcome: | The proposed reward strategies reduce tool calls by 72.07% and improve performance by 22.27%. |
Amphista: Bi-directional Multi-head Decoding for Accelerating LLM Inference (2025.naacl-long)
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Zeping Li, Xinlong Yang, Ziheng Gao, Ji Liu, Guanchen Li, Zhuang Liu, Dong Li, Jinzhang Peng, Lu Tian, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Existing methods such as Medusa lack adequate information interaction between different drafting heads. |
| Approach: | They propose an enhanced speculative decoding framework that builds upon Medusa and integrates a drafting block capable of parallel inference. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms Medusa in terms of head accuracy and latency. |
Behavioral Consistency Validation for LLM Agents: An Analysis of Trading-Style Switching through Stock-Market Simulation (2026.findings-acl)
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Zeping Li, Guancheng Wan, Keyang Chen, Yu Chen, Yiwen Zhao, Philip Torr, Guangnan Ye, Zhenfei Yin, Hongfeng Chai
| Challenge: | Recent studies have applied Large Language Models (LLMs) as agents in financial stock market simulations to test if micro-level behaviors aggregate into macro-level phenomena. |
| Approach: | They propose four alignment metrics and use Mann–Whitney U tests to compare agents’ style-switching behavior with financial theory. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is only partially consistent with financial theory. |
Enhancing One-Shot Pruned Pre-trained Language Models through Sparse-Dense-Sparse Mechanism (2025.coling-main)
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Guanchen Li, Xiandong Zhao, Lian Liu, Zeping Li, Yixing Xu, Dong Li, Lu Tian, Jie He, Ashish Sirasao, Emad Barsoum
| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are robust in contextual understanding but their considerable size incurs significant computational and storage costs. |
| Approach: | They propose a Sparse-Dense-Sparse pruning framework to prune PLMs . they prune less critical connections using conventional pruning methods . |
| Outcome: | The proposed pruning framework outperforms SparseGPT and Wanda under identical sparsity. |