About Me
Hi! I am Li (Shawn) Li, a PhD student at Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, supervised by Prof. Yue Zhao.
Before my PhD study in the USA, I spent wonderful years in Singapore and cooperated with great professors. I served as a research associate at Nanyang Technological University, working with Prof. Aixin Sun. I earned my Master’s degree from National University of Singapore in 2024, where I contributed as a research intern under the guidance of Prof. Tat-Seng Chua and Prof. Roger Zimmermann. Prior to that, I successfully completed my Bachelor’s degree at TongJi University, China in 2022. My research interests are centered around multimodal learning, Out-of-Distribution detection, and information retrieval.
Research Interests
🛡️ Trustworthy and Robust Multimodal Foundation Models
TMLR 2026 ICLR 2025 SIGIR-AP 2025 NeurIPS 2023 TOMM 2024
🤖 Secure and Reliable Large Language Models
⚙️ Agentic, Interactive & Structure-Aware AI Systems
ICLR 2026 MTI-LLM@NeurIPS 2025 🏆 ACL 2025 ICSE 2022
News
Work Experiences
Selected Publications
please refer to google scholar page to check all my publications. (* Equal Contribution)
 |
Defenses Against Prompt Attacks Learn Surface Heuristics
Li Li*, Chenxiao Yu*, Zhiyu Ni*, Hao Li, Charith Peris, Chaowei Xiao, Yue Zhao Preprint |
|
Charts Are Not Images: On the Challenges of Scientific Chart Editing
Li Li, Ryan Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Sunav Choudhary, Franck Dernoncourt, Puneet Mathur, Zhengzhong Tu, Yue Zhao ICLR 2026 |
|
A Personalized Conversational Benchmark: Towards Simulating Personalized Conversations
Li Li, Peilin Cai, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Linxin Song, Tiankai Yang, Yuehan Qin, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhengmian Hu, Bo Ni, Yuxiao Zhou, Zichao Wang, Yue Huang, Yu Wang, Xiangliang Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Xiyang Hu, Yue Zhao MTI-LLM @ NeurIPS 2025 🏆 Spotlight Top 5.6% |
|
Treble Counterfactual VLMs: A Causal Approach to Hallucination
Li Li, Jiashu Qu, Yuxiao Zhou, Yuehan Qin, Tiankai Yang, Yue Zhao EMNLP 2025 Findings |
|
Secure On-Device Video OOD Detection Without Backpropagation
Li Li, Peilin Cai, Yuxiao Zhou, Zhiyu Ni, Renjie Liang, You Qin, Yi Nian, Zhengzhong Tu, Xiyang Hu, Yue Zhao ICCV 2025 |
|
DPU: Dynamic Prototype Updating for Multimodal Out-of-Distribution Detection
Li Li, Huixian Gong, Hao Dong, Tiankai Yang, Zhengzhong Tu, Yue Zhao CVPR 2025 ⭐ Highlight Top 3.7% | UQ4CV @ CVPR 2025 |
|
Backpropagation-Free Multi-modal On-Device Model Adaptation via Cloud-Device Collaboration
Li Li*, Wei Ji*, Zheqi Lv*, Wenqiao Zhang, Mengze Li, Zhen Wan, Wenqiang Lei, Roger Zimmermann TOMM (ACM TMMCA) |
|
Panoptic Scene Graph Generation with Semantics-prototype Learning
Li Li, Wei Ji, Yiming Wu, Mengze Li, You Qin, Lina Wei, Roger Zimmermann AAAI 2024 |
|
Domain-wise Invariant Learning for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation
Li Li, You Qin, Wei Ji, Yuxiao Zhou, Roger Zimmermann ICASSP 2024 |
|
Biased-Predicate Annotation Identification via Unbiased Visual Predicate Representation
Li Li*, Chenwei Wang*, You Qin, Wei Ji, Renjie Liang ACM MM 2023 |
|
On the Importance of Building High-quality Training Datasets for Neural Code Search
Zhensu Sun, Li Li, Yan Liu, Xiaoning Du, Li Li ICSE 2022 🌟 Distinguished Paper Nomination |
Honors and Awards
Services
Educations
08/2024 - present
Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science
University of Southern California, USA
2022.08 - 2024.02
Master of Science in Industry 4.0
National University of Singapore, Singapore
2018.08 - 2022.06
Bachelor of Engineering in Software Engineering
TongJi University, China