Yu Li 李煜

1st-year Ph.D. Student
ECE Dept@GWU
Email:yul@gwu.edu

[Github] [Linkedin] [CV] [Google Scholar]

Biography

I am a 1st-year PhD student in the ECE at GWU, advised by Prof.Tian Lan. My primary research focuses LLM fine-tuning and RL. Prior to this, I interned at several labs, where I worked on visual tasks and generative models.

Recent News

  • [04/2025] I will be pursuing my ECE PhD supervised by Prof.Tian Lan at GWU. I will mainly explore RL and LLM aspects.

  • [03/2025] I will join the AGI Lab for a pre-graduation intern, mainly focusing on generative models.

  • [08/2024] I was awarded the Innova Excellence Scholarship, top 3% in our college.

  • [05/2024] I was awarded the Innova International Exchange Scholarship, thanks to Dr. Charles Huang and Charles Huang Foundation!

Selected Projects

Alpha

AlphaAdam:Asynchronous Masked Optimization with Dynamic Alpha for Selective Updates
Da Chang, Yu Li, Ganzhao Yuan
2025.1
Preprint
[Paper]
Developed AlphaAdam, an LLM optimization framework using intra-layer parameter updates. Created parameter masks based on historical momentum and gradient consistency, paired with adaptive mask strength for efficient optimization and guaranteed convergence. Outperformed AdamW in convergence speed and efficiency across GPT-2, RoBERTa, and Llama-7B tasks.

UCI Fusion Image

Sensor Fusion for Robust and Efficient Autonomous Vehicle Perception
Yu Li, Junyao Wang
2024.6-2024.10
Submitted to ICCV 2025
[Code]

Our main work is to construct our VLM to improve the autonomous driving mode in abnormal weather conditions, focusing on improving the multi-modal fusion algorithm of Camera-Lidar branches. Hopefully it will be advanced to hardware deployment in the future.

Ultrasound Image

Ultrasound image segmentation based on SAM and Transformer multi-level feature fusion
Yu Li, Jin Huang
2023.10-2024.5
Medical Physics

[Code]

We leveraged the rich semantic segmentation information of SAM and applied its fine-grained attention capability to the feature extraction module of Transformer, achieving SOTA IoU scores in ultrasound image segmentation.

Depth Image

Diffusion model with discriminative priors: Self-supervised monocular depth estimation in endoscopy
Yu Li
2024.2-2024.6
Accept, International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery.

[Code]

For endoscope medical scenarios, we use the diffusion model for depth estimation. We build a teacher model, set knowledge distillation, optical appearance and ddim losses, and introduce the teacher's discriminative prior, which significantly enhances the accuracy and confidence of the results.

Education

Experience

Honors and Awards

Innova International Exchange Scholarship, Wuhan University, 2024
Innova Excellence Scholarship (Top 3%), Wuhan University, 2023,2024
Academic Excellence Scholarship (Top 5%), Hongyi Honor College, 2022,2023,2024
First-Class Scholarship (Top 5%), Wuhan University, 2022,2023,2024

Misc

Patent: Energy-saving calculation method, CN116085952.
Journal/conference review services: AAAI 2026, MICCAI 2025, ICCV 2025, Frontiers in Oncology

Beyond