Junbo Li

I’m currently a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at UT Austin, fortunately co-advised by Prof. Atlas Wang and Prof. Qiang Liu. I’m broadly interested in the intersection between machine learning, optimization, and generative AI, where I strike a balance between theoretical understanding and practical application. Most recently, I study:

1. AI reasoning for math / code: Post-training (SFT & RL) and test-time scaling.
2. Math for AI: General / efficient / distributed large-scale neural network optimization.

My works include publications on conferences such as ICLR[1], NeurIPS[2, 3], ECCV[4] and COLM[5, 6]. Additionally, I have contributed to large open-source projects like LLM360.

I was a visiting student with Prof. Eric Xing from 2023 to 2024 and also with Prof. Ruqi Zhang in 2023. I earned my master’s degree in computer science from UC Santa Cruz in 2023 and my bachelor’s degree in mathematics and applied mathematics from Fudan University in 2021. During my undergraduate, I worked with Prof. Zhaoran Wang and Zhuoran Yang. In high school, I studied math competitions for one year, and won a silver medal in the China Mathematical Olympiad (CMO).