About

I'm Tengxiao Liu, a second-year Ph.D. student at University of California, Santa Barbara, advised by Prof. William Wang. I obtained my Master's at Fudan University, advised by Prof. Xipeng Qiu. I was fortunate to work closely with Prof. Prof. Yue Zhang and Prof. Prof. Zheng Zhang at AWS Shanghai AI Lab. I received my bachelor degree in Computer Science at Xi'an Jiaotong University.

I work on natural language processing and generative language models.
My current research focuses on:

• Efficient agentic systems for web search, coding, and long-horizon tasks
• Post-training techniques to improve reasoning and reliability in LLMs
• Scalable synthetic data generation pipelines for scientific and real-world domains

[Github] [CV] [Google Scholar] [LinkedIn]

Selected Publications #

• Budget-Aware Tool-Use Enables Effective Agent Scaling [paper] [media]
  Tengxiao Liu, Zifeng Wang, Jin Miao, I-Hung Hsu, Jun Yan, Jiefeng Chen, Rujun Han, Fangyuan Xu, Yanfei Chen, Ke Jiang, Samira Daruki, Yi Liang, William Yang Wang, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
  Preprint, 2025

• WildSci: Advancing Scientific Reasoning from In-the-Wild Literature [paper]
  Tengxiao Liu, Deepak Nathani, Zekun Li, Kevin Yang, William Yang Wang
  NeurIPS AI4Sci Workshop, 2025
  🏆 2nd prize in Reasoning Dataset Competition

• Can Language Models Learn to Skip Steps? [paper]
  Tengxiao Liu, Qipeng Guo, Xiangkun Hu, Jiayang Cheng, Yue Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Zheng Zhang
  NeurIPS 2024

• Full Parameter Fine-tuning for Large Language Models with Limited Resources [paper]
  Kai Lv, Yuqing Yang, Tengxiao Liu, Qinghui Gao, Qipeng Guo, Xipeng Qiu
  ACL 2024 (oral)

• Plan, Verify and Switch: Integrated Reasoning with Diverse X-of-Thoughts [paper]
  Tengxiao Liu, Qipeng Guo, Yuqing Yang, Xiangkun Hu, Yue Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Zheng Zhang
  NeurIPS 2023 MATH-AI Workshop
  EMNLP 2023

• RLET: A Reinforcement Learning Based Approach for Explainable QA with Entailment Trees [paper]
  Tengxiao Liu, Qipeng Guo, Xiangkun Hu, Yue Zhang, Xipeng Qiu, Zheng Zhang
  EMNLP 2022

Experience #

• Google Cloud AI Research (Summer 2025)
  Student researcher, advised by Dr. Zifeng Wang

• Amazon AWS AI (Mar 2021 - Aug 2024)
  Research intern at AWS Shanghai AI Lab, advised by Dr. Qipeng Guo, Prof. Yue Zhang and Prof. Zheng Zhang

• University of California, San Francisco (Feb 2020 - Mar 2021)
  Undergraduate research assistant at Big Data in Radiology, UCSF, advised by Prof. Jae Ho Sohn

Awards #

• Reasoning Dataset Competition 2nd Prize, 2025
• NeurIPS Travel Award, 2024
• Academic Excellence Fellowship, UC Santa Barbara, 2024
• Shanghai Outstanding Graduate, Shanghai, 2024

Academic Services #

• Reviewer: NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ARR