About Me
Hi! I am Li (Shawn) Li, a PhD student at Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, supervised by Prof. Yue Zhao.
Before my PhD study in the USA, I spent wonderful years in Singapore and cooperated with great professors. I served as a research associate at Nanyang Technological University, working with Prof. Aixin Sun. I earned my Master’s degree from National University of Singapore in 2024, where I contributed as a research intern under the guidance of Prof. Tat-Seng Chua and Prof. Roger Zimmermann. Prior to that, I successfully completed my Bachelor’s degree at TongJi University, China in 2022. My research interests are centered around multimodal learning, Out-of-Distribution detection, and information retrieval.
News
2025.09 - I am awarded the Amazon PhD Fellowship (2025–2026).
2025.08 - Our paper “Treble Counterfactual VLMs: A Causal Approach to Hallucination” is accepted as a Findings paper by EMNLP 2025.
2025.06 - Our paper “Secure On-Device Video OOD Detection Without Backpropagation” is accepted by ICCV 2025.
2025.05 - I will join Adobe as a Research Scientist Intern this summer 2025. Hope to have a great summer life in San Jose!
2025.02 - Our paper “DPU: Dynamic Prototype Updating for Multimodal Out-of-Distribution Detection” is accepted as a Highlight Paper by the CVPR 2025.
2024.11 - Our paper “Backpropagation-Free Multi-modal On-Device Model Adaptation via Cloud-Device Collaboration” is accepted by ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications.
2024.08.22 - Start my PhD journey at USC.
2024.07.31 - My last day at S-Lab NTU and in Singapore.
2024.02 - Start to working as a research associate at S-Lab NTU.
Work Experiences
Research Assistant, FORTIS, USC.
Prof. Yue Zhao
Research Scientist Intern, Adobe Research.
San Jose, CA
Research Associate, S-Lab, NTU.
Prof. Aixin Sun
Research Intern, NExT++, NUS.
Prof. Tat-Seng Chua
Selected Publications
please refer to google scholar page to check all my publications. (* Equal Contribution)
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A Personalized Conversational Benchmark: Towards Simulating Personalized Conversations
Li Li, Peilin Cai, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Junda Wu, Tong Yu, Linxin Song, Tiankai Yang, Yuehan Qin, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Samyadeep Basu, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Ruiyi Zhang, Zhengmian Hu, Bo Ni, Yuxiao Zhou, Zichao Wang, Yue Huang, Yu Wang, Xiangliang Zhang, Philip S. Yu, Xiyang Hu, Yue Zhao Preprint |
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Treble Counterfactual VLMs: A Causal Approach to Hallucination
Li Li, Jiashu Qu, Yuxiao Zhou, Yuehan Qin, Tiankai Yang, Yue Zhao EMNLP 2025 Findings |
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Secure On-Device Video OOD Detection Without Backpropagation
Li Li, Peilin Cai, Yuxiao Zhou, Zhiyu Ni, Renjie Liang, You Qin, Yi Nian, Zhengzhong Tu, Xiyang Hu, Yue Zhao ICCV 2025 |
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DPU: Dynamic Prototype Updating for Multimodal Out-of-Distribution Detection
Li Li, Huixian Gong, Hao Dong, Tiankai Yang, Zhengzhong Tu, Yue Zhao CVPR 2025 (Highlight) | Uncertainty Quantification for Computer Vision @ CVPR |
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Backpropagation-Free Multi-modal On-Device Model Adaptation via Cloud-Device Collaboration
Li Li*, Wei Ji*, Zheqi Lv*, Wenqiao Zhang, Mengze Li, Zhen Wan, Wenqiang Lei, Roger Zimmermann ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications |
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Panoptic Scene Graph Generation with Semantics-prototype Learning
Li Li, Wei Ji, Yiming Wu, Mengze Li, You Qin, Lina Wei, Roger Zimmermann AAAI 2024 |
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Domain-wise Invariant Learning for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation
Li Li, You Qin, Wei Ji, Yuxiao Zhou, Roger Zimmermann ICASSP 2024 |
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Biased-Predicate Annotation Identification via Unbiased Visual Predicate Representation
Li Li*, Chenwei Wang*, You Qin, Wei Ji, Renjie Liang ACM MM 2023 |
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On the Importance of Building High-quality Training Datasets for Neural Code Search
Zhensu Sun, Li Li, Yan Liu, Xiaoning Du, Li Li ICSE 2022, Nominated for ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award |
Honors and Awards
Amazon PhD Fellowship 2025.
Capital One Fellowship 2025.
ICSE 2022 Distinguished Paper Award Nomination.
AAAI 2024 Student Scholarship.
Services
Program Committee Member of CVPR (2026). AAAI (2026), ICML (2025), ICLR (2025, 2026), ICCV (2025), COLM (2025), ICASSP (2025), KDD (2025, 2026), IJCNN (2025), ACM MM (2024), ECCV (2024), ACL ARR (2024, 2025).
Journal Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.
Journal Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.
Journal Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology.
Student Volunteer at ACM Web Conference (2024).
Educations
08/2024 - present
Doctor of Philosophy in Computer Science
University of Southern California, USA
2022.08 - 2024.02
Master of Science in Industry 4.0
National University of Singapore, Singapore
2018.08 - 2022.06
Bachelor of Engineering in Software Engineering
TongJi University, China