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

I'm a rising-junior Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I obtained my bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering from both 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 building world models through orchestrated intelligence. Specifically,

  • Compositionality of Pretrained Models.
  • Multi-Modality and Heterogeneity.
  • Learning from Structured Data/Models.
  • Responsibility and Societal Benefit.
Feel free to drop an email: violet24k AT outlook DOT com, to discuss potential collaborations!

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

Zihao Li (李子豪)

"I believe we did."
📌 Pinned
    I'm in Boston for summer 2025. Let me know if you are around and want to grab a coffee/lobster ☕️🦞!
    Check our newly released graph self-supervised learning toolkit! [📝 Paper] [💻 GitHub]
    How can we describe a graph to LLMs? We systematically survey the parametric representation of graphs! [📝 Paper]
📣 News:
  • [May 2025] One paper accepted by ACL 2025.
  • [May 2025] One paper accepted by ICML 2025.
  • [Mar 2025] I will join Amazon AGI as an applied scientist intern this summer.
  • [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?"


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]
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.

Class-imbalanced Learning Toolbox

Class-imbalanced Ensemble Learning Toolbox.

PyG-SSL

Graph Self-Supervised Learning Toolkit.

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:
Journals: IEEE TKDE (2024, 2025)
2025: KDD (Excellent Reviewer), ICLR, ICASSP, AISTATS, ICML, IEEE IJCNN, ARR Rolling Review, NeurIPS, CIKM
2024: KDD, CIKM, NeurIPS, IEEE DSAA, LoG
2023: IEEE BigData
Awards

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

  • Best Student Poster Award, IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute (Award)
    2025
  • 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 7th, National 294th)
    2018
Acknowledgement

"Do not go gentle into that good night"

My Ph.D. study has been supported by IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute.

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'24 -> Ph.D@Rutgers CS)
Hengyu Liu (Undergrad'24 -> Master@UIUC CS -> Ph.D@UIUC CS)
Jie Wang (Undergrad'24 -> Master@UPenn)
Miscellaneous

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. Alexandr V. Kostochka - Dr. Jaehoon Kim - Dr. Hanghang Tong - Noob. Zihao Li).