Hi:wave:, I am Zhaoyi (Joey) Li, a computer science Ph.D. student at University of Science and Technology of China and City University of Hong Kong, co-adviced by Dr. Ying Wei, Dr. Defu Lian and Dr. Linqi Song. Previously, I got my Bachelor degree in Computer Science and Technology at University of Science and Technology of China in 2022.
My research goal is about building trustworthy and transparent AI models that achieve human-like reasoning and systematic generalization. Specifically, I want to make human beings and neural network systems better understand each other (i.e., high interpretability and good generalization of blackbox deep models). I currently focus on investigating the compositionality of language models, which is about the mechanism that language models decompose complex questions and concepts into primitive ones and re-compose them step-by-step to grasp the complex semantic meaning. I am super curious about whether the end-to-end trained large-scale deep models are able to grok human-like reasoning skills or not and how to demonstrate it both empirically and theoretically. I would love to discuss on related topics should anyone is interested (always feel free to drop me an email: lizhaoyi777\(AT\)mail.ustc.edu.cn)!
π₯ News
- 2026.01: Β ππ Two papers were accepted by ICLR 2026.
- 2025.12: I started an internship journey in Meituan
LongCat 
Team. - 2025.08: Β ππ One paper was accepted by EMNLP 2025.
- 2025.02: Β ππ One paper was accepted by ICLR 2025.
- 2024.09: Β ππ One paper was accepted by Machine Learning Journal.
- 2024.09: Β ππ One paper was accepted by EMNLP 2024.
- 2024.05: Β ππ Two papers were accepted by ACL 2024.
- 2023.05: Β ππ My first paper was accepted by ACL 2023.
π Selected Papers
* indicates co-first authorship
π Honors and Awards
- 2024.10 China National Scholarship, USTC, Graduate Students.
- 2022 ο½ 2024 First prize, USTC Graduate Student Academic Scholarship.
- 2022.06 Honored as The Outstanding Bachelor Graduate of USTC.
- 2022.04 YuanQing (CEO of Lenovo Co.) Research Student Scholarship.
- 2020 First prize, The 20th USTC RoboGame, Competition Group.
- 2019 ο½ 2022 First prize, USTC Excellent Undergraduate Scholarship.
- 2019 USTC Ms.XIA Peisu Scholarship for Excellent Undergraduates of CS Major.
- 2017.10 First prize, National (Senior) High School Mathematical Competition of China.
- 2014.5 First prize, National (Junior) High School Mathematical Competition of China.
π Educations
- 2023.09 - now, PhD student, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong.
- 2022.09 - now, PhD student, School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China.
- 2018.09 - 2022.07, Undergraduate, School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China.
π» Internships
- 2025.12 ~ present, Meituan , LongCat LLM Team , Beijing, China.
- 2021.05 - 2021.09, Summer Research Internship Programm, Hong Kong University.
π Services
- Invited Reviewer:
- Conference: EMNLP (2023, 2025), NeurIPS (2024,2025), ICLR (2025,2026), ICML 2025.
- Workshop: AIM-FM 2024, Compositional Learning 2024, ACL SRW 2025, TrustKDD 2025.
- Journal: TMLR, TALSP.
- Teaching Assistant:
- USTC, 01112701 Data Structures and Algorithms, 2021 Fall
- CityU, CS5481 Data Engineering, 2023 Fall
- CityU, CS1302 Introduction to Computer Programming, 2024 Spring
- USTC, AI2501 Mathematical Principles and Algorithms of AI, 2025 Spring
πββ¬ Special Links
- Here is the link to the homepage of my girlfriend: Ranran Shen.