Hi! I’m Yanhong Li. I am currently a pre-doctoral researcher at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), advised by Luca Soldaini on data-efficient pretraining for LMs and mentored by Will Merrill in theory for linear RNNs and hybrid models. I’m broadly interested in LM efficiency (spanning data efficiency, model architectures, and inference) and in understanding theoretical questions about the expressivity of different LLM architectures. Always happy to chat about research (yanhongl@allenai.org)! :)

This past summer, I was a visiting student at MIT CSAIL, supervised by Prof. Yoon Kim and mentored by the wonderful Songlin Yang (I distilled so much from her!!). 

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I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2025. During undergrad, I was extremely grateful to work with Prof. David McAllester (TTIC), Prof. Karen Livescu (TTIC), Prof. Michael Maire (UChicago), Prof. Jiawei Zhou (Stony Brook), and Prof. Allyson Ettinger (AI2). I couldn’t appreciate their invaluable insights and support more. A huge thank-you as well to my early mentors: David Yunis (TTIC), Chenghao Yang (UChicago), and Marcelo Sandoval-Castañeda (TTIC)—they taught me so much when I knew nothing about research. Be sure to check out their interesting work!

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