Hongyi Liu Ph.D. Student Computer Science Rice University 6100 Main St., MS 132 Houston TX 77005-1892 E-mail: hl87 at rice dot edu LinkedIn Google Scholar

Bio

Hi there! I'm a CS Ph.D student at Rice University. My advisor is Dr. Xia Ben Hu. I got my B.S. degree in physics from University of Science and Technology of China(USTC). I previously worked with Dr. Ang Chen on network system and security.

Research Interests

I design efficient machine learning algorithms and systems using techniques such as sparsification and speculative decoding, while improving system robustness and security. My research centers on LLM post-training, including efficiency, long-context, LLM agents, routing, and security.

• Efficiency and long-context LLMs. [HedgeSpec] [ProxSparse] [KVBench] [AutoL2S] [StopOverthinking] [FailFast]
• RAG, LLM safety, LLM Agent, LLM Routing. [LoRATK] [RouterArena] [Router] [Chain-of-query]
• Before LLM era: efficient machine learning and applications. [StructDrop] [RMT]
• Systems and network. [RDMI] [Bedrock] [Runtime] [Cloudless]

I am seeking full-time research scientist/engineer positions. Please feel free to contact me regarding any opportunities!

Industry Experiences

Publications

Fail Fast, Win Big: Rethinking the Drafting Strategy in Speculative Decoding via Diffusion LLMs
Rui Pan, Zhuofu Chen, Hongyi Liu, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Ravi Netravali
Preprint


Not-a-Bandit: Provably No-Regret Drafter Selection in Speculative Decoding for LLMs
Hongyi Liu, Jiaji Huang, Zhen Jia, Youngsuk Park, Yu-Xiang Wang
To appear in ICLR 2026


RouterArena: An Open Platform for Comprehensive Comparison of LLM Routers
Yifan Lu, Rixin Liu, Jiayi Yuan, Xingqi Cui, Shenrun Zhang, Hongyi Liu, Jiarong Xing
To appear in ICLR 2026


Who Routes the Router: Rethinking the Evaluation of LLM Routing Systems
Jiayi Yuan, Yifan Lu, Rixin Liu, Yu-Neng Chuang, Hongyi Liu, Shaochen Zhong, Yang Sui, Guanchu Wang, Jiarong Xing, Xia Hu
Preprint


Chain-of-Query: Unleashing the Power of LLMs in SQL-Aided Table Understanding via Multi-Agent Collaboration
Songyuan Sui, Hongyi Liu, Serena Liu, Li Li, Soo-Hyun Choi, Rui Chen, Xia Hu
AACL'25 (Oral)


AutoL2S: Auto Long-Short Reasoning for Efficient Large Language Model
Feng Luo, Yu-Neng Chuang, Guanchu Wang, Hoang Anh Duy Le, Shaochen Zhong, Hongyi Liu, Jiayi Yuan, Yang Sui, Vladimir Braverman, Vipin Chaudhary, Xia Hu
Preprint


Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models
Yang Sui, Yu-Neng Chuang, Guanchu Wang, Jiamu Zhang, Tianyi Zhang, Jiayi Yuan, Hongyi Liu, Andrew Wen, Shaochen Zhong, Hanjie Chen, Xia Hu
TMLR


ProxSparse: Regularized Learning of Semi-Structured Sparsity Masks for Pretrained LLMs
Hongyi Liu, Rajarshi Saha, Zhen Jia, Youngsuk Park, Jiaji Huang, Shoham Sabach, Yu-Xiang Wang, George Karypis
ICML25


Attack on LLMs: LoRA once, backdoor everywhere in the share-and-play echosystem
Hongyi Liu*, Shaochen Zhong*, Xintong Sun*, Minghao Tian, Zirui Liu, Ruixiang Tang, Jiayi Yuan, Yu-Neng Chuang, Li Li, Soo-Hyun Choi, Rui Chen, Vipin Chaudhary, Xia Hu
EMNLP finding 2025


StructDrop: A Structured Random Algorithm Towards Efficient Large-scale Graph Training
Hongyi Liu, Zirui Liu, Kaixiong Zhou, Tong Zhao, Neil Shah, Xia Ben Hu
Preprint

KV Cache Compression, But What Must We Give in Return? A Comprehensive Benchmark of Long Context Capable Approaches
Hongyi Liu*, Jiayi Yuan*, Shaochen Zhong*, Yu-Neng Chuang, Songchen Li, Guanchu Wang, Duy Le, Hongye Jin, Vipin Chaudhary, Zhaozhuo Xu, Zirui Liu, Xia Hu
EMNLP finding 2024


Simplifying Cloud Management with Cloudless Computing
Yiming Qiu, Patrick Tser Jern Kon, Jiarong Xing, Yibo Huang, Hongyi Liu, Xinyu Wang, Peng Huang, Mosharaf Chowdhury and Ang Chen
HotNets 2023


Remote Direct Memory Introspection
Hongyi Liu, Jiarong Xing, Yibo Huang, Danyang Zhuo, Srinivas Devadas, Ang Chen
USENIX Security 2023 (Distinguished Paper Award)


Bedrock: Programmable Network Support for Secure RDMA Systems
Jiarong Xing, Kuo-Feng Hsu, Yiming Qiu, Ziyang Yang, Hongyi Liu, and Ang Chen
USENIX Security 2023


A Vision for Runtime Programmable Networks
Jiarong Xing, Yiming Qiu, Kuo-Feng Hsu, Hongyi Liu, Matty Kadosh, Alan Lo, Aditya Akella, Thomas Anderson, Arvind Krishnamurthy, T. S. Eugene Ng, and Ang Chen
HotNets 2021


Toward Reconfigurable Kernel Datapaths with Learned Optimizations
Yiming Qiu, Hongyi Liu, Thomas E.Anderson, Yingyan Lin, Ang Chen
HotOS 2021