Hi, I'm Kevin Li

I am a second year Ph.D. student at CMU's Machine Learning Department, where I am fortunate enough to be co-advised by both Prof. Albert Gu and Prof. Zico Kolter. Previously, I was a Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering undergrad at Georgia Tech, where I had a wonderful time advised by Prof. Polo Chau.
I am interested in developing efficient deep learning architectures and methods and scaling inference compute for reasoning and general performance. Please reach out if you are interested in collaborating!
I have had stints at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Qualcomm, and Bosch in both engineering and research-focused roles.

Featured Research Publications

VLM Inference Scaling Laws
Scaling laws for VLM inference for balancing image token count and LLM size.
ICLR 2025
Project PDF Code
Cross-Architectural Distillation
Cross-architectural distillation from Transformers to Mamba models with just a fraction of the pretraining data.
NeurIPS 2024
Project PDF Code
Designing Adversarially Robust Architectures
A suite of generalizable robust architectural design principles
BMVC 2023
Best Poster
Project PDF Code
Argo Scholar
Exploration of Literature with Interactive Visualization
IEEE VIS 2021
Best Poster, Honorable Mention
Project PDF Code

Honors and Awards

Spring 2025
NSF GRFP, Honorable Mention
Spring 2023
Georgia Tech Provost’s Academic Excellence Award
Selected to represent the College of Computing for most outstanding scholastic record
Spring 2023
G.D. Jain Outstanding Senior in Biomedical Engineering Award
Selected for exemplifying all-around excellence through their significant accomplishments in several of the following categories of activities: service, academics, research, industry, and entrepreneurship
Fall 2022
CIKM 2022 NSF Travel Award
Selected to receive the CIKM 2022 NSF Travel Award
Fall 2022
President's Undergraduate Research Award (PURA)
Selected to receive Georgia Tech's PURA award for work on Argo Scholar
Summer 2022
First Place, Qualcomm Intern Hackathon
1st place at Qualcomm's intern hackathon for creating information propagation framework for autonomous vehicles
Spring 2022
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant of the Year, Georgia Institute of Technology
Selected as one of three undergraduate teaching assistants to be awarded the institute-wide award for TAing CS4641/7641 Machine Learning
Spring 2022
Undergraduate Teaching Assistant of the Year, College of Computing
Selected as UTA of the year for the CSE school under the College of Computing for TAing CS4641/7641 Machine Learning
Fall 2021
Best Poster Honorable Mention, IEEE VIS
For "Argo Scholar: Interactive Visual Exploration of Literature in Browsers"
Fall 2019
Winner, HackGT6 Hackathon
Winner of “Marketplace of the Future” challenge by Anthem for work on accessing medicine availability based on insurance information

Research Experience

Oct. 2023 - Current
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA
Graduate Research Assistant,
Advisor: Albert Gu and Zico Kolter
Aug. 2020 - May 2023
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Polo Club of Data Science
Advisor: Duen Horng (Polo) Chau
Conducted research in machine learning, human-computer interaction, and the intersection of the two.
Jan. 2019 — Dec. 2019
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
Student Researcher, Laboratory for Intelligent Decision and Autonomous Robots (LIDAR) Lab
Advisor: Ye Zhao
Worked on controlling cost-effective, physical model of the human hand.