Weixian Waylon Li
Waylon Li

PhD Candidate in AIAI

About Me

I am currently a PhD student at the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute at School of Informatics in University of Edinburgh, proud to be supervised by Prof. Tiejun Ma. I finished my Master by Research degree (2021-2022) at the Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation in University of Edinburgh with Prof. Shay Cohen and my bachelors degree at University of Edinburgh as well.

Since the advent of large language models (LLMs), my recent research has primarily focused on applying LLMs and learning-to-rank models in financial applications. I also have experience in fundamental research on deep learning based ranking algorithms, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and financial synthetic data vault (SDV). Before LLMs emerged, I researched language model pretraining using mathematical corpora and syntactic parsing.

Additionally, I have interned as a researcher at Huawei Technologies Research & Development (UK) Ltd and The Alan Turing Institute. I have also contributed to teaching several courses related to machine learning and natural language processing at the University of Edinburgh.

Download CV
Interests
  • DL-based ranking models
  • Domain adaptation of LLMs
  • Information Retrieval
  • Financial SDV
Education
  • PhD in AIAI

    University of Edinburgh

  • Master by Research in ILCC

    University of Edinburgh

  • BSc Artificial Intelligence

    University of Edinburgh

  • BSc Applied Mathematics

    South China University of Techonology

Publications
(2025). Can LLM-based Financial Investing Strategies Outperform the Market in Long Run?. Accepted to KDD 2026.
(2025). Learn to Rank Risky Investors: A Case Study of Predicting Retail Traders' Behaviour and Profitability. Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS).
(2024). SynthRank: Synthetic Data Generation of Individual’s Financial Transactions Through Learning to Ranking. AI in Finance for Social Impact @ AAAI 2024.
Recent News

2025

November

  • Will give a joint talk with Prof. Tiejun Ma at CBG Cloud Service Ireland AI Applications Workshop 2025.
  • Our paper "Can LLM-based Financial Investing Strategies Outperform the Market in Long Run?" is accepted by KDD 2026.
  • Start a new internship at Tencent IEG Lightspeed Studios UK as an NLP researcher

September

  • One paper accepted by ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)

August

  • Presented our TSPRank paper on SIGKDD 2025 in Toronto, Canada.
Latest Blog Posts
The blog posts have been moved to my Notion site, which offers easier formatting and better design.