Leshu Li
2026
LipoAgent: Coordinating Fine-Tuned LLM Agents for Safer Lipid Design
Leshu Li | An Lu | Haiyu Wang | Zhibin Feng | Conghui Duan | Qing Bao | Zongmin Zhao | Sai Qian Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Leshu Li | An Lu | Haiyu Wang | Zhibin Feng | Conghui Duan | Qing Bao | Zongmin Zhao | Sai Qian Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) are among the most clinically mature platforms for nucleic acid delivery, yet designing lipids that are both effective and biologically safe remains a major bottleneck. In practical screening, toxicity is a decision-level constraint: if a lipid is toxic, its efficiency prediction is clinically irrelevant. We propose LipoAgent , a safety-aware multi-agent LLM framework for lipid discovery. LipoAgent combines domain-specific fine-tuning with a conditional prediction objective that enforces toxicity as a prerequisite for efficiency prediction, and further improves reliability via multi-agent verification with lightweight human oversight when disagreement persists. Across multiple foundation models, LipoAgent achieves an average 32% relative improvement in mRNA transfection efficiency prediction compared with other reported models for lipid design. Wet-lab validation confirms that virtual screening rankings reliably translate to biological transfection outcomes. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/SAI-Lab-NYU/LipoAgent.git.
2025
LAMB: A Training-Free Method to Enhance the Long-Context Understanding of SSMs via Attention-Guided Token Filtering
Zhifan Ye | Zheng Wang | Kejing Xia | Jihoon Hong | Leshu Li | Lexington Whalen | Cheng Wan | Yonggan Fu | Yingyan Celine Lin | Souvik Kundu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Zhifan Ye | Zheng Wang | Kejing Xia | Jihoon Hong | Leshu Li | Lexington Whalen | Cheng Wan | Yonggan Fu | Yingyan Celine Lin | Souvik Kundu
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
State space models (SSMs) achieve efficient sub-quadratic compute complexity but often exhibit significant performance drops as context length increases. Recent work attributes this deterioration to an exponential decay in hidden-state memory. While token filtering has emerged as a promising remedy, its underlying rationale and limitations remain largely non-understood. In this paper, we first investigate the attention patterns of Mamba to shed light on why token filtering alleviates long-context degradation. Motivated by these findings, we propose LAMB, a training-free, attention-guided token filtering strategy designed to preserve critical tokens during inference. LAMB can boost long-context performance for both pure SSMs and hybrid models, achieving up to an average improvement of 30.35% over state-of-the-art techniques on standard long-context understanding benchmarks. Our analysis and experiments reveal new insights into the interplay between attention, token selection, and memory retention, and are thus expected to inspire broader applications of token filtering in long-sequence modeling.