Lei Li

I am a PhD student in the HKU-NLP group, co-supervised by Prof. Lingpeng Kong and Prof. Qi Liu. I completed my master's degree at Peking University advised by Prof. Xu Sun and my bachelor's degree at Xidian University.

My research focuses on: (i) developing frontier multimodal large language models (MiMo-VL, Reka Flash); (ii) understanding the fundamental mechanisms of LLMs and MLLMs (In-context Learning, LLMs-as-a-Judge). I'm always happy to discuss potential collaborations—feel free to reach out!

News

• [2026/01] Honored to receive the inaugural Tencent Qingyun Scholarship (15 awardees per year nationwide)!
• [2025/11] One paper accepted at AAAI 2026. Received Outstanding Area Chair Award at EMNLP 2025!
• [2025/08] Two papers accepted by EMNLP 2025 and one by ACM MM 2025!
• [2025/02] VL-RewardBench and Video-MME accepted by CVPR 2025, both Highlight (Top 3%)!
• [2025/01] Four papers accepted by ICLR 2025, see you in Singapore!
• [2024/10] FairEval selected as Most Influential Paper of ACL 2024!
• [2023/12] Label Words are Anchors won Best Long Paper Award at EMNLP 2023!

Education

• PhD Student, The University of Hong Kong · Sept. 2023 – Now
• MSc in Computer Science, Peking University · Sept. 2020 – July 2023
• BE in Software Engineering, Xidian University · Sept. 2016 – Jul. 2020

Experience

• Xiaomi LLM-Core Team, Core Member · Jan. 2025 – Now
• Reka AI, Multi-modal LLM R&D Intern · Jul. 2023 – Dec. 2024
• Shanghai AI Lab, Research Intern · Jul. 2022 – Jun. 2023 Mentor: Dr. Jingjing Xu
• WeChat AI, Research Intern · Apr. 2020 – Nov. 2021 Mentor: Dr. Yankai Lin and Dr. Peng Li

Selected Publications

(#: Equal Contribution)

Multimodal LLMs

• VL-RewardBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Vision-Language Generative Reward Models Lei Li #, Yuancheng Wei #, Zhihui Xie #, Xuqing Yang #, Yifan Song, Peiyi Wang, Chenxin An, Tianyu Liu, Sujian Li, Bill Yuchen Lin, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu CVPR 2025 (Highlight, Top 3%) [Paper] [Project]
• Video-MME: The First-Ever Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark of Multi-modal LLMs in Video Analysis Chaoyou Fu, Yuhan Dai, Yongdong Luo, Lei Li, Shuhuai Ren, Renrui Zhang et al. CVPR 2025 (Highlight, Top 3%, Most Influential Paper) [Paper] [Project]
• Temporal Reasoning Transfer from Text to Video Lei Li #, Yuanxin Liu #, Linli Yao, Peiyuan Zhang, Chenxin An, Lean Wang, Xu Sun, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu ICLR 2025 [Paper] [Project]
• VLFeedback: A Large-Scale AI Feedback Dataset for Large Vision-Language Models Alignment Lei Li #, Zhihui Xie #, Mukai Li, Shunian Chen, Peiyi Wang, Liang Chen, Yazheng Yang, Benyou Wang, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu EMNLP 2024 [Project]
• VITATECS: A Diagnostic Dataset for Temporal Concept Understanding of Video-Language Models Shicheng Li, Lei Li, Shuhuai Ren, Yuanxin Liu, Yi Liu, Rundong Gao, Xu Sun, Lu Hou ECCV 2024 [Paper] [Dataset]
• Multimodal ArXiv: A Dataset for Improving Scientific Comprehension of Large Vision-Language Models Lei Li #, Yuqi Wang #, Runxin Xu, Peiyi Wang, Xiachong Feng, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu ACL 2024 [Project]
• Can Language Models Understand Physical Concepts? Lei Li, Jingjing Xu, Qingxiu Dong, Ce Zheng, Qi Liu, Lingpeng Kong, Xu Sun EMNLP 2023 [Paper] [Dataset]

Emerging Capabilities of LLMs

• A Survey for In-context Learning Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Ce Zheng, Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Heming Xia, Jingjing Xu, Zhiyong Wu, Baobao Chang, Xu Sun, Lei Li, Zhifang Sui EMNLP 2024 (Most Influential Paper) [Paper] [Paper List]
• Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators Peiyi Wang, Lei Li, Liang Chen, Zefan Cai, Dawei Zhu, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu, Tianyu Liu, Zhifang Sui ACL 2024 (Most Influential Paper) [Paper] [Code]
• Label Words are Anchors: An Information Flow Perspective for Understanding In-Context Learning Lean Wang, Lei Li, Damai Dai, Deli Chen, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun EMNLP 2023 (Best Long Paper Award) [Paper] [Code]

Academic Service

• Area Chair / Action Editor: ACL ARR (2024 – Now)
• Reviewer / Program Committee: IJCV, ACM CSUR, TASLP, AAAI 2025, NeurIPS (2023 – ), COLM (2024 – ), ICML (2024 – ), CVPR (2024 – ), ICLR (2024 – Now), ACL (2020 – 2023), EMNLP (2019 – 2023)
• Teaching Assistant: Smart Phone Apps Development (2024, HKU) · Machine Learning in Trading and Finance (2023 Fall, HKU) · Computational Linguistics (2021 Fall, PKU)

Invited Talks

• [2024/10] AI TIME — VLFeedback: A Large-Scale AI Feedback Dataset for Large Vision-Language Model Alignment [Video]
• [2023/12] NICE-NLP — Can Large Language Models Understand Physical Concepts? [Video]
• [2023/03] LCC-Lab, BLCU — A Survey on In-context Learning [Video]

Awards

• Tencent Qingyun Scholarship (inaugural, 15 nationwide), 2026
• Outstanding Area Chair, EMNLP, 2025
• Best Long Paper Award, EMNLP, 2023
• National Scholarship, Peking University, 2021
• National Scholarship, Xidian University, 2019
• Best Demo Award, DeeCamp, 2018

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