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Yuu Li
Happy times at Kemper Hall, UC Davis, 2023

Yuu Li [ユウ・リー] [유 이]

Ph.D. Candidate in ECE at GW

I am a second-year Ph.D. candidate supervised by Prof. Tian Lan and work with Prof. Zhengling Qi. I do tiny research on LLMs, mainly exploring the internal mechanisms of LLM training and inference and performing attribution-based optimization.

ResearchLLM Reasoning · Agentic Systems · Vision and Control

CV GitHub Google Scholar LinkedIn

Education

George Washington University, Washington, D.C.
Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering · GPA 4.0/4.0
2025.9 – 2028.12 (expected)
Wuhan University, Hongyi Honor College, China
B.Eng. in Microelectronics Science and Technology · GPA 3.87/4.0
2021.9 – 2025.5

News

  • [09/2026] OPPO and InsPO are accepted to NeurIPS 2026 🎉. See you in Sydney.
  • [07/2026] MomentKV is accepted to COLM 2026 🎉. See you in San Francisco.
  • [06/2026] I started serving as a reviewer for the TMLR.
  • [05/2026] I will join ByteDance as a Research Scientist Intern in San Jose from May to August 🚀.
  • [02/2026] CRAFT-LORA is accepted to CVPR 2026 🎉.

Selected Publications

Recent Research

ARISE: Agent Reasoning with Intrinsic Skill Evolution in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Yu Li, Rui Miao, Zhengling Qi, Tian Lan
Under review · Paper · Code
Right Meets Wrong: Bilateral Context Conditioning with Reward-Confidence Correction for GRPO
Yu Li, Tian Lan, Zhengling Qi
Under review · Paper · Code
Hindsight Self-Distillation: Demonstrating to the Teacher for On-Policy LLM Reasoning
Yu Li, Shu Hong, Tian Lan
Under review · Paper
VideoGen-Agent: Reinforcing Video Generation Agents
Binxu Li, Haoyi Duan, Yuhui Zhang, ..., Yu Li, et al.
arXiv 2026 · Paper

Conferences

OPPO: Bayesian Value Recursion for Token-Level Credit Assignment in LLM Reasoning
Yu Li, Rui Miao, Tian Lan, Zhengling Qi
NeurIPS 2026 · Paper
InsPO: Unlocking Intrinsic Self-Reflection for LLM Preference Optimization
Yu Li, Tian Lan, Zhengling Qi
NeurIPS 2026 · Paper · Code
MomentKV: Closing the Directional Gap in KV Cache Eviction for Long-Context Inference
Yu Li, Binxu Li, Tian Lan
COLM 2026 · Paper
Reason in Chains, Learn in Trees: Self-Rectification and Grafting for Multi-turn Agent Policy Optimization
Yu Li, Sizhe Tang, Tian Lan
ACL Findings 2026
CRAFT-LoRA: Content-Style Personalization via Rank-Constrained Adaptation and Training-Free Fusion
Yu Li, Yujun Cai, Chi Zhang
CVPR 2026 · Paper · Code
Calibrating and Rotating: A Unified Framework for Weight Conditioning in PEFT
Chang Da, Peng Xue, Yu Li, Yongxiang Liu, Pengxiang Xu, Shixun Zhang
AAAI 2026 · Paper · Code

For the full list of publications, please see my Google Scholar.

Experiences

Mobile Intelligence Lab, George Washington University
Research Topic: Post-training, RL, Reasoning
Advisor: Prof. Tian Lan · Aug. 2025 – Present
Artificial General Intelligence Lab, Westlake University
Research Topic: Generative AI
Advisor: Prof. Chi Zhang · Mar. 2025 – Jul. 2025
Cyber-Physical Systems Lab, UC Irvine
Research Topic: Multimodal Uncertainty Fusion
Advisor: Prof. Mohammad Al Faruque · Jun. 2024 – Oct. 2024
GREAT Summer Research Program, UC Davis
Research Topic: Deep Learning for Healthcare
Advisor: Prof. Weijian Yang · Jul. 2023 – Oct. 2023

Honors and Awards

  • ICML 2026 Gold Reviewer (Top Reviewers Recognition), 2026
  • 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
  • Patent: Energy-saving calculation method, CN116085952.

Academic Services

The peer review mechanism is breaking down, but conscientious peer review endures:

  • Conference Reviewer: NeurIPS’26, COLM’26, ACM MM’26, ICML’26, ICLR’26, AAAI’26, ICASSP’26
  • Journal Reviewer: TMLR, TPAMI, ToN, Neurocomputing

Fun Facts

  • I am a Pokémon fan. Poké Ball
  • I love walking and hiking.
  • My favorite animal is our family cat, dd. She likes it when I pat her head. White cat

This website was stolen from my best friend CD.