👋 Hello! / 你好! / こんにちは! / 안녕하세요! / Bonjour! / Guten Tag! / Hola! / Ciao! / السلام عليكم!

I work as a member in UIUC DAIS Group (Specifically iDEA-iSAIL Group) with Prof. Jingrui He towards building world models through orchestrated intelligence. Specifically,

• Compositionality of Pretrained Models. [ACL'25 Main; NeurIPS'25 Spotlight; arXiv'25]
• Multi-Modality and Heterogeneity. [KDD'24; CIKM'25]
• Learning from Structured Data/Models. [WWW'23; SIGIR'24; NeurIPS'24; KDD'25; ICML'25; CIKM'25; NeurIPS'25]
• Responsibility and Societal Benefit. [EMNLP'25 Findings]

Google Scholar  /  Github  /  X (Twitter)  /  LinkedIn  /  Instagram   

Zihao Li (李子豪)

"I believe we did."

"Nobody should escape our universities without knowing how little one knows."

Ph.D.          2023 - 2028 (expected)                        University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)                        Computer Science, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science
B.S.              2019 - 2023 (double-degree)                        University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)                        Computer Engineering, Summa Cum Laude
B.E.              2019 - 2023 (double-degree)                        Zhejiang University (ZJU)                        Electronic and Computer Engineering, National Scholarship receipient and Outstanding Graduate

"Why limit yourself to just one dogma?"

Amazon AGI, Boston, Massachusetts, USA Applied Scientist Intern • May.-Aug. 2025 Conversational AI, Central Analytics & Research Science (CARS) Group Mentor: Dr. Gopinath Chennupati, Manager: Dr. Rinat Khaziev
Microsoft Research Asia, Shanghai, China Research Intern • Jun.-Sep. 2024 LLM & AI Agents, Shanghai AI/ML Group Mentor: Dr. Kaitao Song, Manager: Dr. Dongsheng Li
Teaching Assistant, UIUC and ZJU [expand] CS 357: Numerical Methods I (Spring 2025), with Mariana Silva, UIUC. [Course Website] ECE/CS 438: Communication Networks (Fall 2022), with Romit Roy Choudhury, UIUC. [Course Website] [Course Page] Math 257: Linear Algebra with Computational Applications (Fall 2022), with Thomas Honold, ZJU-UIUC Institute. [Course Website] [Course Syllabus] Math 241: Calculus Ⅲ (Fall 2021), with Thomas Honold, ZJU-UIUC Institute. [Course Syllabus] Math 231: Calculus Ⅱ (Fall 2020), with Nikolai Docuchaev, ZJU-UIUC Institute. [Course Syllabus]

"Genius is no guarantee of wisdom."

"Theory will only take you so far."

RLHF-Reward-Modeling Cookbook of reproducibly training SOTA reward models. Collborated with Wei Xiong and Prof. Tong Zhang.
Class-imbalanced Learning Toolbox Class-imbalanced Ensemble Learning Toolbox.
PyG-SSL Graph Self-Supervised Learning Toolkit.
Awesome-Flow-Matching-Meets-Biology A curated list of flow matching in biological applications.
HowToUIUC Guide for international students to survive (cozily) at UIUC.

"Together, we can unlock the secrets of the natural world and build a better future for all."

"It won't be for you, it would be for them."

• Best Student Poster Award, IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute (Award)
  2025
• “Star of Tomorrow” Award, Microsoft Research
  2024
• Golub Endowment (one-year Ph.D. fellowship)
  2023
• National Scholarship of China (top 0.2%, highest honor)
  2022
• Zhejiang University Scholarship - First Prize (top 3%)
  2022
• The Mathematical Contest in Modeling - Meritorious Winner (top 7%)
  2022
• Provincial Government Scholarship of Zhejiang Province (top 3%)
  2021
• Chinese Mathematical Olympiad - Bronze Medal (Provincial 7^th, National 294^th)
  2018

"Do not go gentle into that good night"

I enjoy both watching and playing soccer⚽ (real "foot"ball) games. My squad number is 22 = 10(Attacking Midfielder) + 8(Central Midfielder or Box-to-Box Midfielder) + 4(Defensive Midfielder or Centre Back). I like frisbee🥏 as well.

I love Jazz and LoFi music🎧. I play the piano🎹 myself and am a big fan of ANIMENZ. I love Whiskey🥃 and used to bartend🍸 myself.

My Erdős number is 4 (Dr. Paul Erdős - Dr. Shlomo Moran - Dr. Tamar Eilam - Dr. Jingrui He - Noob. Zihao Li).