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Manling Li

Assistant Professor
Northwestern University

Amazon Scholar

Amazon

manling.li AT northwestern.edu

Hi, there! I’m Manling. I am an assistant professor of Computer Science at Northwestern University, affiliated with Center for Robotics and Biosystems and Cognitive Science. I direct the Machine Learning and Language (MLL) Lab. I am also an Amazon Scholar working on conversational agents. Prior to this, I was a postdoc at Stanford University (2024), working with Jiajun Wu and mentored by Fei-Fei Li. I obtained my PhD at UIUC (2023), advised by Heng Ji and mentored by Shih-Fu Chang. I am a recipient of MIT Tech Review 35 Under 35 in 2025, ACL Inaugural Best Desseratation Award Hornorable Mention in 2025, DARPA Riser in 2022, and a EECS Rising Star in 2022, Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship in 2021, etc. Our work on multimodal reasoning was recognized as ACL'24 Outstanding Paper Award, ACL'20 Best Demo Paper Award, NAACL'21 Best Demo Paper Award, etc. I served as organizing committee of ACL'25 (virtual co-chairs), NAACL'25 (publication co-chairs), EMNLP'24 (demo co-chairs), etc.

I aim to make AI and LLMs beneficial for humans, working at the intersection of language, vision, robotics, and society. I focus on Reasoning, Planning, Compositionality, with applications in Embodied AI and AI for science. At the core of my research, I build machines that interact with the physical world via multimodal data (Language + X, where X can be robotics, vision, audio, etc). The ultimate goal is to promote trustworthiness and truthfulness through a structured view that is explainable, highly compositional, and capable of long-horizon reasoning.

Prospective students: I have several PhD positions in Fall 2026 and intern positions.

>> We have amazing new faculty at NU working on robotics and foundation models, please check out Ruohan! He also has several PhD positions in Fall 2026.
>> If you are interested in PhD at Northwestern, please apply to NorthwesternCS. Due to the large amount of emails, I aplogize that I will not able to reply to individual emails (Please note that non-reply does NOT indicate non-interesting, largely means emails got missed or I unfortunately did not get time to check such emails before applications). Please choose me as a potential advisor in the application, and I will check every application carefully in late Dec and do interviews in Jan-Mar.
>> If you are interested in doing research internship with our group, please feel free to talk to any of the PhD students to join their projects, and many of them are looking for collaborators. The best way is to submit this form and drop an email to limanling.ai@gmail.com. This mailbox has been checked more frequently.
>> Prospective_Students_English
>> Prospective_Students_Chinese
>> Proud of what our students have achieved in the very first year!

Junior PhD/master/undergraduate students: I will dedicate 30 minutes each week to offer guidance/suggestions/mentorship, especially for students from underrepresented groups or whoever is in need. If you would like to chat about life, career path, graduate school applications, or research ideas related to AI/ML, feel free to file the form to schedule a meeting.

Invited Talks


Publications

Academic Service

  • Organizing Committee
    • ACL 2025 (Virtual Infrastructure Chairs)
    • NAACL 2025 (Publication Chairs) summary
    • EMNLP 2024 (Demonstration Chairs) summary
    • Foundation Models Meet Embodied Agents @ CVPR 2025 workshop
    • Towords Knowledgeable Foundation Models @ ACL 2025 workshop
    • Towords Knowledgeable Foundation Models @ AAAI 2025 workshop
    • Towords Knowledgeable Foundation Models @ ACL 2024 workshop
    • Knowledge Discovery from Unstructured Data in Financial Services (KDF) @ SIGIR 2023 Workshop
  • Senior Area Chair: EMNLP (from 2025)
  • Area Chair: ACL (from 2023), EMNLP (from 2023), NAACL (from 2024), COLM (from 2025)
  • Program Committee: ARR (ACL Rolling Review, from 2021), ACL (from 2021), EMNLP (from 2021), NAACL-HLT (from 2021), AAAI (from 2021), WWW (from 2021), AKBC (2021), EACL (from 2021), KDD DI Workshop (2021), NLPCC (2021), COLING (from 2020), AACL (from 2020), CCL (from 2020)
  • Journal Reviewer: TACL, TIST, TKDE
  • Community Services
    • ACL Student Research Workshop (SRW) Mentor, ACL, 2024
    • ACM Mentor, ACM Mentorship Program at UIUC, 2022
    • CS Ambassador, UIUC CS Visit Day for Prospective Graduate Students, 2022
    • Advising Assistant, UIUC PhD Orientation Seminar, 2021
    • Graduate Student Representative, UIUC CS Visit Day, 2020

Awards

Selected Awards

  • ACL Inaugural Best Desseratation Award Honorable Mention
  • MIT Tech Review 35 Under 35 Global List
  • Best Poster Award at MMLS 2025
  • Best Paper Award at RSS 2025 workshop on Continual Robot Learning from Humans
  • Outstanding Paper Award at ACL 2024
  • Best Paper Award at SoCal NLP 2024
  • Best Demo Paper Award at NAACL 2021
  • Best Demo Paper Award at ACL 2020
  • AAAI 2025 New Faculty Highlights
  • Microsoft Research Postdoc Fellowship 2023
  • EE CS Rising Star 2022
  • DARPA Riser 2022
  • Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship 2021
  • Mavis Future Faculty Fellow
  • C.L. and Jane Liu Award
  • National Scholarship

Academic and Scientific Competitions

Teaching

Instructor:

Guest Lecturer:

  • Navigating Up and Down in the Job Searching
    COMP_SCI 496 Academic Job Search
    NU, Fall 2023
  • Event-Centric Multimedia Encoding
    CS 6604 Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing
    Virginia Tech, Fall 2022
  • Knowledge-Driven Vision-Language Pretraining
    CS 546 Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing
    UIUC, Fall 2022
  • Recent Advances in Multimedia Encoding
    CS 546 Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing
    UIUC, Fall 2022
  • Timeline Summarization: Introducing Temporal Dimensions into Summarization
    CS 598 Knowledge Driven Natural Language Generation
    UIUC, Spring 2022
  • Multimedia Encoding via Vision-Language Pretraining
    CS 546 Advanced Topics in Natural Language Processing
    UIUC, Fall 2021

Students

It is a great pleasure to work with such talented young people. I am grateful for the trust that they have placed in me.
Proud of what our students have achieved in their very first year!

PhD Students

Visiting PhD Students