Lichen Li


Welcome to my homepage!

Hi! I am a final-year undergraduate at Yuanpei College, Peking University, majoring in Data Science with a minor in Philosophy.

My research is driven by a philosophical curiosity rooted in epistemology, about how large models integrate perception and language to gain knowledge. I focus on Multimodal AI and AI Reasoning, with a interest in building more intelligent, efficient and interpretable AI systems. My long-term goal is to develop AI that not only advance technical capabilities but also enhance access to quality knowledge and promote equity for underserved communities.

Research Experience

Reward Hacking Monitoring in Reasoning LLMs | UCLA Jul 2025 - Mar 2026
Advisors: Prof. Cho-Jui Hsieh & Prof. Tianyi Zhou (UMD)
(preprint) Do Synthetic Trajectories Reflect Real Reward Hacking? A Systematic Study on Monitoring In-the-Wild Hacking in Code Generation

Visual Token Pruning in Multimodal LLMs | PKU Mar 2025 - Jun 2025
Advisor: Prof. Shanghang Zhang
(NeurIPS 2025) Beyond Attention or Similarity: Maximizing Conditional Diversity for Token Pruning in MLLMs

Vertical Federated Learning under Privacy Constraints | JHU Jun 2024 - Aug 2024
Advisor: Prof. Yinzhi Cao

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Vision Transformers | PKU Mar 2024 - Jun 2024
Advisor: Prof. Shanghang Zhang

Education

Peking University 2021 - 2026 (Expected)
B.S. in Data Science and Big Data Technology, Minor in Philosophy
Honors: PKU Merit Student (2025)
Leadership: PKU Demonstration Class (2023, Class Monitor)

The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China 2018 - 2021
High School

The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China 2015 - 2018
Middle School

A Bit More About Me :)

  • mbti ♒️: E/INTJ
  • What I enjoy🌟: Philosophy, Reading, Theater, Photography📷, Running, Cycling, Singing.
  • Some Books📚 & Plays🎭 I love:
    • The Republic (by Plato)
    • Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men (by Rousseau)
    • Zhuangzi
    • Rhinoceros in Love 🦏
    • Man of La Mancha (musical)