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Zhening Li

4 accepted papers

2026

The First Impression Problem: Internal Bias Triggers Overthinking in Reasoning Models

ICLR 2026poster

Reasoning models often exhibit overthinking, characterized by redundant reasoning steps. We identify \emph{internal bias} elicited by the input question as a key trigger of such behavior. Upon encountering a problem, the model immediately forms a preliminary guess about the answer, which we term an…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

EnCompass: Enhancing Agent Programming with Search Over Program Execution Paths

NeurIPS 2025poster

We introduce a new approach to *agent programming*, the development of LLM-based agents. Current approaches to agent programming often entangle two aspects of agent design: the core workflow logic and the inference-time strategy (e.g., tree search). We introduce *probabilistic angelic nondeterminism…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

When Do Skills Help Reinforcement Learning? A Theoretical Analysis of Temporal Abstractions

ICML 2024poster

Skills are temporal abstractions that are intended to improve reinforcement learning (RL) performance through hierarchical RL. Despite our intuition about the properties of an environment that make skills useful, a precise characterization has been absent. We provide the first such characterization,…

2023

Predictive Chemistry Augmented with Text Retrieval

EMNLP 2023long main

This paper focuses on using natural language descriptions to enhance predictive models in the chemistry field. Conventionally, chemoinformatics models are trained with extensive structured data manually extracted from the literature. In this paper, we introduce TextReact, a novel method that directl…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar