Whatever you do, do it 100%

👋 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

research internship for 2025 summer in the US

📣 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]

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]

Publications (*equal contribution)

"Genius is no guarantee of wisdom."

Conference

APEX²: Adaptive and Extreme Summarization for Personalized Knowledge Graphs.
Zihao Li, Dongqi Fu, Mengting Ai, Jingrui He

KDD 2025 (Full Research). AR: 19%. Manuscript and Code are in preparation.
PageRank Bandits for Link Prediction
Yikun Ban, Jiaru Zou, Zihao Li, Yunzhe Qi, Dongqi Fu, Jian Kang, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He

NeurIPS 2024 (Full Research). AR: 25.8% Code
Heterogeneous Contrastive Learning for Foundation Models and Beyond
Lecheng Zheng, Baoyu Jing, Zihao Li, Hanghang Tong, Jingrui He

KDD 2024 (Tutorial + Survey). Website
SpherE: Expressive and Interpretable Knowledge Graph Embedding for Set Retrieval
Zihao Li, Yuyi Ao, Jingrui He

SIGIR 2024 (Short). AR: 24%. Code
Everything Evolves in Personalized PageRank
Zihao Li*, Dongqi Fu*, Jingrui He

TheWebConf 2023 (Full Research and Oral). AR: 19.2% Code

Preprint

Can Graph Neural Networks Learn Language with Extremely Weak Text Supervision?
Zihao Li, Lecheng Zheng, Bowen Jin, Dongqi Fu, Baoyu Jing, Yikun Ban, Jingrui He, Jiawei Han

Available on Arxiv.
Provably Extending PageRank-based Local Clustering Algorithm to Weighted Directed Graphs with Self-Loops and to Hypergraphs
Zihao Li, Dongqi Fu, Hengyu Liu, Jingrui He

Available on Arxiv.
Hypergraphs as Weighted Directed Self-Looped Graphs: Spectral Properties, Clustering, Cheeger Inequality
Zihao Li, Dongqi Fu, Hengyu Liu, Jingrui He

Available on Arxiv.
Parametric Representation of Graphs: Progresses, Challenges, and Opportunities
Dongqi Fu*, Liri Fang*, Zihao Li*, Hanghang Tong, Vetle I. Torvik, Jingrui He

Available on Arxiv.

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:
Journals: IEEE TKDE (2024)
2025: KDD (Excellent Reviewer), ICLR, ICASSP, AISTATS, ICML, IEEE IJCNN
2024: KDD, CIKM, NeurIPS, IEEE DSAA, LoG
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).