Manling Li - Northwestern CS – Intern/PhD - NLP/CV/AI/ML/EmbodiedAI

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limanling
5810
8
Research Interest
1. Multimodal Foundation Models
  • Large Language Models (LLMs)
  • Vision-Language Foundation Models (VL models, especially for long videos)
  • Vision-Language-Action Foundation Models (VLA models, LLMs for Embodied AI)
2. Planning, Reasoning and Compositionality
  • From Large Language Model to Large Agent Model
  • Decision Making GPT, Agent Model Training
  • Going deeper: Spatial Reasoning, Geometric Structure Understanding, Law of Physics
  • Going longer: Long Horizon Reasoning, Long Video Encoding and Reasoning
3. Mechanistic Interpretability, Knowledge + LLMs
  • The next generation of knowledge representation (code representation, program induction, symbolic represenation, etc)
  • Model editing, Knowledgeable foundation models (Where does certain knowledge come from? How much do these models know? Is this knowledge correct? If it is wrong, can we fix it?)
  • Controlling LLMs / foundation models (ACL 2024 Outstanding Paper)
4. Factuality, Faithfulness, Trustworthiness
  • NLP + Psychology (theory of mind, framing, information propagation, debiasing, etc)
  • Fact checking
  • AI for Science, Claim feasibility verification, Figure/Chart editing, Paper/Review generation, etc
招生
  • 2-5个全奖计算机系博士(Fall 2025 or later),1个博士后(Fall 2025 or later)
  • 多个实习生,可in-person可remote (Fall 2024 or later,长期有效,优秀者可提供in-person RA)
  • 会给实习生提供多个idea可以选择,如果想做自己的idea,也非常supportive
  • 优秀者可以和Stanford/UIUC老师们合作
  • 曾mentor 1 master/undergraduate students,都发表了顶会论文,其中大部分是他们的第一篇论文
  • 优秀者可推荐top学校交流访问,或者top公司研究院实习和工作
  • 和我合作的学生背景很多元化,我目前最骄傲的一个学生是从土木转的CS,我也一直希望能建立一个多元化的组。
  • 我自身受到了很多很多老师的帮助和指导,我遇到了世界上最好的博士导师(Prof Heng Ji,强推!),我看到了“以松弛的态度做研究”,也逐渐享受做研究的乐趣。因此我希望能和学生们一起做有趣的研究,尊重学生的研究兴趣,最重要的是,get to know yourself,find your true passion,do good research,帮助学生达成目标。
  • 我会希望培养学生发表一作论文的能力,而不是同时做好几个项目、但每一个都不承担重要责任。Leadership是重要的能力,我在博一到博四之前基本发的基本是一作论文,目前Google Scholar里高引论文也基本是我的一作或者共一论文,所以我希望学生能够不焦虑,认真地对待自己的研究,发一篇是一篇,论文质量永远大于数量。
  • 我非常重视collaboration,并会着重培养学生的presentation能力,学习如何去沟通、pitch collaborator、讲东西as simple as possible,etc。
  • 我在进行PhD Research Skill Training Lectures,每周一次,包括What is good research, Paper Writing, Figure/Table Tricks, Math/Latex, Paper Title, Coding Tricks, Appendix Writing, Paper Page Limit, Website/Video Making, Rebuttal, Paper Reviewing, Presentation, Best Paper Session, Ethical Issues, Collaborations, Project Management, Energy Management, etc。跟我一起做研究的学生都可以参加。
  • 最重要的:highly motivated with ownership on projects,我后来发现做研究最重要的是兴趣,其次才是努力和天分。有了兴趣,会逐渐形成自己的research vision,而不是人云亦云地做incremental improvement。我们可以先一起讨论你的目标,然后看怎样能够最好地帮助你成长。
  • 有相关研究经验的加分。
导师简介
  • Manling Li is an Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, and currently a postdoc at Stanford University, mainly working with Jiajun Wu, Juan Carlos Niebles, and Fei-Fei Li. She obtained the PhD degree in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2023, advised by Heng Ji.
  • She mainly publishes at ACL/CVPR/NeurIPS/ICLR/EMNLP/NAACL/...
  • Her work has been awarded ACL 2024 Outstanding Paper, ACL 2020 Best Demo Paper Award, NAACL 2021 Best Demo Paper Award, etc.
  • She has rich experience in working with students, leading 19 students to develop UIUC Knowledge Extraction System and ranked first in NIST SM-KBP in 2019 and 2020.
  • She delivered tutorials at ACL'21, AAAI'21, CVPR'23, AAAI'23, IJCAI24 and lead ACL 2024 Knowledgeable LLMs workshop.
  • She served as reviewers for top AI journals such as TACL, TKDE, TIST, and served as organizing committee at
  • CL conferences (Virtual Infrastructure Chairs of ACL 2025, Publication Chairs at NAACL 25, Demo Track Chairs at EMNLP 2024, etc.)
  • She was awarded Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, EE CS Rising Star, etc.
  • 主页:limanling.github.io
学校/项目简介
  • Northwestern University是美国著名顶尖私校,长期稳居美国top 10,世界top 30
  • 地处Evanston,属于芝加哥北郊富人区那块,环境好也安全
  • 学校极其漂亮,有两块private beach给教工/学生
  • 喜欢大城市的便利,又希望少一点大城市的喧嚣和危险,Northwestern绝对是最好的选择之一。遍布校车站,半小时uber到芝加哥市区,到芝加哥机场也只要三十来分钟,外卖都可以点chinatown的。
申请流程
  • Intern申请请填写表格forms.gle,之后请发送邮件1point3acres.com: Prospective Intern – Your Name,请注明已填写表格。
  • PhD申请Northwestern CS PhD program mccormick.northwestern.edu by December 1, 2024【请把我列为感兴趣的导师之一(必要条件,抱歉由于时间关系,我只能审完写我名字的材料)】.
  • PhD 申请不需要发送邮件,如果有时间想一起work,可以按照Intern的方式发送邮件。非常抱歉不能回复PhD申请的邮件,我会在12月底认真看每一份申请,12月底之后可以联系我问申请情况,可以发邮件更新自己的信论文【我没有回邮件不代表不感兴趣,在审材料前统一不回邮件是为了更加公平】
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