# Manling Li - Northwestern美国西北大学 - CS PhD/Intern

### **Research Interest**

**A. Agent Model Training, Planning and Reasoning**
- RAGEN: Training agent under a MDP formulation
- Language + Robotics: Embodied Agent Interface, Vision-Language-Action models (VLA)
- Planning, Reasoning and Compositionality

**B. Spatial Intelligence, Multimodal (Language + Vision/Robotics)**
- Spatial Cognition / Spatial Reasoning
- World Modeling
- The scaling law of spatial intelligence

**C. Mechanistic Interpretability**
- Open up the model to understand the inner working
- The physics of LLMs/VLMs
- Intervene / controlling foundation models

**D. Factualness, Trustworthiness**
- NLP + Social (theory of mind, framing, information propagation, debiasing, etc)
- AI for Science, Claim feasibility verification, Figure/Chart editing, Paper/Review generation, etc

### **招生**

- 3-5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 15 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里高引论文也大多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 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：https://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https://forms.gle/unVqpW97bGwQsrRz5，之后请发送邮件[e-mail]: Prospective Intern – Your Name，请注明已填写表格。
- PhD申请Northwestern CS PhD program https://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/computer-science/academics/graduate/admissions by December 1, 2024【请把我列为感兴趣的导师之一（必要条件，非常抱歉由于时间关系，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】