About Me

Hi! I am Li (Shawn) Li, a PhD candidate 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 trustworthy multimodal foundation models, secure and reliable large language models, and agentic AI with memory and tool use.

Research Interests

News

Work Experiences

Selected Publications

please refer to google scholar page to check all my publications. (* Equal Contribution)

Controlled Decoding Attacks on Black-Box LLMs Jesson Wang*, Li Li*, Wei Yang, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Charith Peris, Yue Zhao Preprint

JigShape: Evaluating Visual-Geometric Reasoning in VLMs through Jigsaw Puzzles Li Li, Wei Yang, Jike Zhong, Jiate Li, Jiawei Yang, You Qin, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Roger Zimmermann, Yue Wang, Zhengzhong Tu, Vicente Ordonez, Mohit Bansal, Yue Zhao Preprint

Agent Safety Is Action Alignment Li Li, Yue Zhao Preprint

FORTIS: Benchmarking Over-Privilege in Agent Skills Li Li, Chenxiao Yu, Han Wang, Wei Yang, Ryan Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Xiyang Hu, Philip Yu, Chaowei Xiao, Huan Zhang, Yue Zhao Preprint

Geometry over Density: Few-Shot Cross-Domain OOD Detection Li Li*, You Qin*, Jiate Li, Charith Peris, Lisa Bauer, Roger Zimmermann, Yue Zhao NeurIPS 2026

The Autonomy Tax: Defense Training Breaks LLM Agents Li Li, Yue Zhao EMNLP 2026

Defenses Against Prompt Attacks Learn Surface Heuristics Li Li*, Chenxiao Yu*, Zhiyu Ni*, Hao Li, Charith Peris, Chaowei Xiao, Yue Zhao ACL 2026

Charts Are Not Images: On the Challenges of Scientific Chart Editing Li Li, Ryan Rossi, Sungchul Kim, Sunav Choudhary, Franck Dernoncourt, Puneet Mathur, Zhengzhong Tu, Yue Zhao ICLR 2026

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 MTI-LLM @ NeurIPS 2025 🏆 Spotlight Top 5.6%

Treble Counterfactual VLMs: A Causal Approach to Hallucination Li Li, Jiashu Qu, Yuxiao Zhou, Yuehan Qin, Tiankai Yang, Yue Zhao EMNLP 2025

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

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 Top 3.7%  |  UQ4CV @ CVPR 2025

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 TOMM (ACM TMMCA)

Panoptic Scene Graph Generation with Semantics-prototype Learning Li Li, Wei Ji, Yiming Wu, Mengze Li, You Qin, Lina Wei, Roger Zimmermann AAAI 2024

Domain-wise Invariant Learning for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation Li Li, You Qin, Wei Ji, Yuxiao Zhou, Roger Zimmermann ICASSP 2024

Biased-Predicate Annotation Identification via Unbiased Visual Predicate Representation Li Li*, Chenwei Wang*, You Qin, Wei Ji, Renjie Liang ACM MM 2023

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 🌟 Distinguished Paper Nomination

Honors and Awards

Services

Educations

08/2024 - present

Doctor of Philosophy

University of Southern California, USA

2022.08 - 2024.02

Master of Science

National University of Singapore, Singapore

2018.08 - 2022.06

Bachelor of Engineering

TongJi University, China