Hi there! I am Yu Li (李煜, /juː/), a Research Scientist at Salesforce AI Research. I completed my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Columbia University in 2025, advised by Prof. Zhou Yu.
My current research focuses on LLM agents and agent post-training. Previously I worked on conversational AI, including dialogue systems, dialogue summarization, language model alignment, and the use of large language models for education and accessibility, with research internships at Microsoft Research and Amazon. I received my M.S. from UC Davis and B.S. from Zhejiang University.
News
- Jul 2025 Started as a Research Scientist at Salesforce AI Research.
- Oct 2025 Defended my Ph.D. in Computer Science at Columbia. Committee members: Prof. Julia Hirschberg, Prof. Kathleen McKeown, Dr. Michel Galley, Prof. Yang Liu, Prof. Zhou Yu.
Publications
- 2026 Don't Stop Early: Scalable Enterprise Deep Research with Controlled Information Flow and Evidence-Aware Termination. Preprint. Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Kung-Hsiang Huang, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Jiaxin Zhang, Vaibhav Vats, Yu Li, Xiangyu Peng, Chien-Sheng Wu.
- 2026 InterviewSim: A Scalable Framework for Interview-Grounded Personality Simulation. Preprint. Yu Li, Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Yada Pruksachatkun, Chien-Sheng Wu.
- 2026 The Need for a Socially-Grounded Persona Framework for User Simulation. Preprint. Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Yu Li, Yada Pruksachatkun, Chien-Sheng Wu.
- 2025 Exploring the Use of VLMs for Navigation Assistance for People with Blindness and Low Vision. Preprint. Yu Li, Yuchen Zheng, Giles Hamilton-Fletcher, Marco Mezzavilla, Yao Wang, Sundeep Rangan, Maurizio Porfiri, Zhou Yu, John-Ross Rizzo.
- 2025 Visual Language Model-based Food Safety Support for Persons with Blindness and Low Vision. ICCV 2025 Workshops (ACVR). Ryan Hansen, Hardik Setia, Giles Hamilton-Fletcher, Aryan Jain, Zirui Liu, Mariam Zoair, Reem Aboutaleb, Qing Wen, Yu Li, John Ross Rizzo.
- 2024 LIONs: An Empirically Optimized Approach to Align Language Models. EMNLP 2024. Xiao Yu, Qingyang Wu, Yu Li, Zhou Yu.
- 2024 From Pixels to Personas: Investigating and Modeling Self-Anthropomorphism in Human-Robot Dialogues. EMNLP 2024 (Findings). Yu Li, Devamanyu Hazarika, Di Jin, Julia Hirschberg, Yang Liu.
- 2024 Curriculum-Driven Edubot: A Framework for Developing Language Learning Chatbots Through Synthesizing Conversational Data. SIGDIAL 2024. Yu Li, Shang Qu, Jili Shen, Shangchao Min, Zhou Yu.
- 2023 User Adaptive Language Learning Chatbots with a Curriculum. AIED 2023. Kun Qian, Ryan Shea, Yu Li, Luke K. Fryer, Zhou Yu.
- 2023 DIONYSUS: A Pre-trained Model for Low-Resource Dialogue Summarization. ACL 2023. Yu Li, Baolin Peng, Pengcheng He, Michel Galley, Zhou Yu, Jianfeng Gao.
- 2022 Robots-Don't-Cry: Understanding Falsely Anthropomorphic Utterances in Dialog Systems. EMNLP 2022. David Gros*, Yu Li*, Zhou Yu.
- 2022 Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems' Quality with Context-Aware Item Meta Information. NAACL 2022 (Findings). Bowen Yang, Cong Han, Yu Li, Lei Zuo, Zhou Yu.
- 2022 Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue Generation with a Unified Knowledge Representation. NAACL 2022. Yu Li, Baolin Peng, Yelong Shen, Yi Mao, Lars Liden, Zhou Yu, Jianfeng Gao.
- 2022 Using Chatbots to Teach Languages. L@S 2022. Yu Li, Chun-Yen Chen, Dian Yu, Sam Davidson, Ryan Hou, Xun Yuan, Yinghua Tan, Derek Pham, Zhou Yu.
- 2021 Refine and Imitate: Reducing Repetition and Inconsistency in Persuasion Dialogues via Reinforcement Learning and Human Demonstration. EMNLP 2021 (Findings). Weiyan Shi, Yu Li, Saurav Sahay, Zhou Yu.
- 2021 LEGOEval: An Open-Source Toolkit for Dialogue System Evaluation via Crowdsourcing. ACL 2021 (Demo). Yu Li, Josh Arnold, Feifan Yan, Weiyan Shi, Zhou Yu.
- 2021 The R-U-A-Robot Dataset: Helping Avoid Chatbot Deception by Detecting User Questions About Human or Non-Human Identity. ACL 2021. David Gros, Yu Li, Zhou Yu.
- 2021 Towards Emotional Support Dialog Systems. ACL 2021. Siyang Liu, Chujie Zheng, Orianna Demasi, Sahand Sabour, Yu Li, Zhou Yu, Yong Jiang, Minlie Huang.
- 2021 Alternating Recurrent Dialog Model with Large-scale Pre-trained Language Models. EACL 2021. Qingyang Wu, Yichi Zhang, Yu Li, Zhou Yu.
- 2021 DEUX: An Attribute-Guided Framework for Sociable Recommendation Dialog Systems. Preprint. Yu Li, Shirley Anugrah Hayati, Weiyan Shi, Zhou Yu.
- 2020 A Multi-Persona Chatbot for Hotline Counselor Training. EMNLP 2020 (Findings). Orianna Demasi, Yu Li, Zhou Yu.
- 2020 Gunrock 2.0: A User Adaptive Social Conversational System. 3rd Proceedings of Alexa Prize. Kaihui Liang, Austin Chau, Yu Li, Xueyuan Lu, Dian Yu, Mingyang Zhou, Ishan Jain, Sam Davidson, Josh Arnold, Minh Nguyen, Zhou Yu.
- 2020 End-to-End Trainable Non-Collaborative Dialog System. AAAI 2020. Yu Li, Kun Qian, Weiyan Shi, Zhou Yu.
Teaching
- 2023 COMS W4705: Natural Language Processing, Columbia University (Teaching Assistant).
- 2022 COMS W4156: Advanced Software Engineering, Columbia University (Teaching Assistant).
Miscellaneous
Outside of work, I play basketball (peaked at twelve), chess (still learning to be good), and draw (no ChatGPT involved).