Yongqi Li
PhD student, CSE, HKUST
yongqi.li [at] connect.ust.hk
About
I am a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), supervised by Prof. Xiaofang Zhou, starting from Fall 2026. Prior to this, I obtained my M.Eng. (supervised by Prof. Tieyun Qian) and B.Eng. (with honors) from Wuhan University in 2026 and 2023, respectively. My current research interests lie in understanding and improving the generalization of AI models as they learn from experience.
Experience
Research Intern, Tongyi Lab, Alibaba — Character AI
May 2025 – Jan. 2026
Selected Publications
* corresponding † equal contribution — full list
Controlling Multimodal Conversational Agents with Coverage-Enhanced Latent Actions
Yongqi Li†, Hao Lang†, Tieyun Qian*, Yongbin Li*
Understanding Generalization in Role-Playing Models via Information Theory
Yongqi Li†, Hao Lang†, Fei Huang, Tieyun Qian*, Yongbin Li*
Aligning VLM Assistants with Personalized Situated Cognition
Yongqi Li, Shen Zhou, Xiaohu Li, Xin Miao, Jintao Wen, Mayi Xu, Jianhao Chen, Birong Pan, Hankun Kang, Yuanyuan Zhu*, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian*
Strong Empowered and Aligned Weak Mastered Annotation for Weak-to-Strong Generalization
Yongqi Li, Xin Miao, Mayi Xu, Tieyun Qian*
Awards & Honors
National Scholarship — Ministry of Education
2025
Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis — Wuhan University
2023
Hongyi Honor Graduate Award — Undergraduate College, Wuhan University
2023
Service
Conference Reviewer — ACL 2024–2026, EMNLP 2024–2026, NAACL 2024–2025, EACL 2024–2026, AAAI 2025–2026
© 2026 Yongqi Li