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limanling.ai@gmail.com: 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】