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 understanding, Out-of-Distribution detection, and information retrieval.

News

2025.01 - Our paper “PyOD 2: A Python Library for Outlier Detection with LLM-powered Model Selection” is accepted by the WebConf 2025 Demo Track.

2024.12 - We have a new paper evaluating how LLMs can help with anomaly detection (AD-LLM); see our Preprint.

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.

2024.10 - Our paper “Towards Complex-query Referring Image Segmentation: A Novel Benchmark” is accepted by ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications.

2024.10 - We have a new paper on multimodal OOD detection; see our Preprint.

2024.10 - We have a new paper on concept-based zero-shot OOD detection; see our Preprint.

2024.08.22 - Start my PhD journey at USC.

2024.07.31 - My last day at S-Lab NTU and in Singapore.

2024.7 - We have a new paper on ranked video moment retrieval; see our Preprint.

2024.02 - Start to working as a research associate at S-Lab NTU.

Work Experiences

Research Assistant, FORTIS, USC.

Research Associate, S-Lab, NTU.

Research Intern, NExT++, NUS.

Publications

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

AD-LLM: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Anomaly Detection Tiankai Yang*, Yi Nian*, Li Li, Ruiyao Xu, Yuangang Li, Jiaqi Li, Zhuo Xiao, Xiyang Hu, Ryan Rossi, Kaize Ding, Xia Hu, Yue Zhao Preprint

DPU: Dynamic Prototype Updating for Multimodal Out-of-Distribution Detection Li Li, Huixian Gong, Hao Dong, Tiankai Yang, Zhengzhong Tu, Yue Zhao Preprint

COOD: Concept-based Zero-shot OOD Detection Zhendong Liu*, Yi Nian*, Henry Peng Zou, Li Li, Xiyang Hu, Yue Zhao Preprint

TVR-Ranking: A Dataset for Ranked Video Moment Retrieval with Imprecise Queries Renjie Liang, Li Li, Chongzhi Zhang, Jing Wang, Xizhou Zhu, Aixin Sun Preprint

Efficient Temporal Sentence Grounding in Videos with Multi-Teacher Knowledge Distillation Renjie Liang, Yiming Yang, Hui Lu, Li Li Preprint

PyOD 2: A Python Library for Outlier Detection with LLM-powered Model Selection Sihan Chen*, Zhuangzhuang Qian*, Wingchun Siu*, Xingcan Hu, Jiaqi Li, Shawn Li, Yuehan Qin, Tiankai Yang, Zhuo Xiao, Wanghao Ye, Yichi Zhang, Yushun Dong, Yue Zhao WebConf 2025, Demo Paper

Backpropagation-Free Multi-modal On-Device Model Adaptation via Cloud-Device Collaboration Wei Ji*, Li Li*, Zheqi Lv*, Wenqiao Zhang, Mengze Li, Zhen Wan, Wenqiang Lei, Roger Zimmermann ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications

Towards Complex-query Referring Image Segmentation: A Novel Benchmark Wei Ji, Li Li, Hao Fei, Xiangyan Liu, Xun Yang, Juncheng Li, Roger Zimmermann ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing Communications and Applications

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

VPGTrans: Transfer Visual Prompt Generator across LLMs Ao Zhang, Hao Fei, Yuan Yao, Wei Ji, Li Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Tat-Seng Chua NeurIPS 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, Nominated for ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award

Honors and Awards

Capital One Fellowship 2025.

ICSE 2022 Distinguished Paper Award Nomination.

AAAI 2024 Student Scholarship.

Services

Program Committee Member of ICML (2025).

Program Committee Member of ICLR (2025).

Program Committee Member of ICASSP (2025).

Program Committee Member of IJCNN (2025).

Program Committee Member of ACM MM (2024).

Program Committee Member of ECCV (2024).

Program Committee Member of ACL ARR (2024).

Program Committee Member of ICLR AGI Workshop (2024).

Program Committee Member of ACM MM MMGR Workshop (2023, 2024).

Journal Reviewer for Frontiers of Information Technology & Electronic Engineering.

Journal Reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.

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