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

I'm a sophomore Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining UIUC in 2023, I received my bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from UIUC and Zhejiang University with Summa Cum Laude.

I work as a member in UIUC DAIS Group (Specifically iDEA-iSAIL Group) with Prof. Jingrui He towards:

  • Learning on Graphs.
  • LLM-based Multi-agent Systems.
  • Multi-modality Generative Models.
  • AI Governance/Policy.
Feel free to drop an email: violet24k AT outlook DOT com, to discuss potential collaborations!

Semantic Scholar  /  Google Scholar  /  Github  /  Twitter  /  LinkedIn   

Zihao Li (李子豪)

"I believe we did."

📌 Pinned
    I am looking for a research internship for 2025 summer in the US and am interested to know any recruitment openings.
📣 News:
  • [Nov 2024] One paper accepted by KDD 2025.
  • [Sep 2024] One paper accepted by NeurIPS 2024.
  • [Apr 2024] Take a look at our KDD'24 survey regarding contrastive learning for foundation models.
  • [Mar 2024] I will join Microsoft Research Asia as a research intern this summer.
  • [Mar 2024] One paper accepted by SIGIR 2024.
  • [Aug 2023] Officially started my Ph.D. journal at UIUC CS. Let's go Illini!
Education

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


Ph.D.          2023 - 2028 (expected)
                       University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
                       Department of Computer 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
                      
Experience

"Why limit yourself to just one dogma?"


Microsoft Research Asia, Shanghai, China
Research Intern • Jun.-Sep. 2024
LLM & AI Agents, Shanghai AI/ML Group
Mentor: Dr. Kaitao Song

Teaching Assistant, ZJU and UIUC [expand]
Publications (*equal contribution)

"Genius is no guarantee of wisdom."

Conference
       Preprint

Open-sourced Projects

"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.

HowToUIUC

Guide for international students to survive (cozily) at UIUC.
Services

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

Program Committee/Reviewer:
2025: KDD, ICLR, LoG, ICASSP, AISTATS, IEEE TKDE
2024: KDD, CIKM, NeurIPS, IEEE DSAA
2023: IEEE BigData
Awards

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

  • 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
    2018
Acknowledgement

"Do not go gentle into that good night"

In my undergraduate years, I have fortunately collaborated with (alphabetically) Prof. Yan Chen (NWU, IL), Prof. Jingrui He (UIUC), Prof. Simon Hu (ZJU), Prof. Zuozhu Liu (ZJU), Prof. Klaus-Dieter Schewe (ZJU), Prof. Lav R. Varshney (UIUC). Many thanks to anyone who guided or helped me.

Also, I'm very thankful to the research interns that I have worked with:
Jingyuan Huang (Undergrad -> Ph.D@Rutgers CS)
Hengyu Liu (Undergrad -> Master@UIUC CS)
Jie Wang (Undergrad -> Master@UPenn)
Miscellaneous

I enjoy both watching and playing soccer⚽ (real "foot"ball) games. My favorite teams are Manchester City F.C., Real Madrid CF, and Liverpool F.C.. 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. Alexandr V. Kostochka - Dr. Jaehoon Kim - Dr. Hanghang Tong - Noob. Zihao Li).