Fenghai Li

About

Hello! My name is Fenghai Li. I am a senior majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am a research intern at the U Lab with Prof. Jiaxuan You, mentored by Haofei Yu. I have also worked on research ideation with Zijian Ding.

I'm always enthusiastic about collaborating with researchers from diverse fields. If you're interested in working together, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in AI for scientific discovery and self-evolving agents.

AI for Scientific Discovery. I want to build agents that take part in the full research cycle—surveying the literature, proposing hypotheses, designing and running experiments, and interpreting the results. I am especially interested in how agents can judge which ideas are worth pursuing, and how to evaluate whether their work genuinely advances a field rather than merely looking plausible.

Self-Evolving Agents. I am interested in agents that keep improving after deployment by learning from feedback, accumulating memory and skills, and refining their own strategies, rather than staying fixed once trained. I care about making this improvement reliable as tasks and environments shift. Scientific research is a natural testbed: every experiment yields feedback an agent can learn from.

Publications

Can Large Language Models Forecast What Researchers Study Next?

Fenghai Li, Zihan Tang, Haofei Yu, Yining Zhao, and Jiaxuan You

EMNLP 2026 (Main Conference)oral presentation!

ResearchCube: Multi-Dimensional Trade-off Exploration for Research Ideation

Zijian Ding, Fenghai Li, Ziyi Wang, and Joel Chan

Under review

LiveTradeBench: Seeking Real-World Alpha with Large Language Models

Haofei Yu, Fenghai Li, and Jiaxuan You

Preprint 2025

TinyScientist: An Interactive, Extensible, and Controllable Framework for Building Research Agents

Haofei Yu*, Keyang Xuan*, Fenghai Li*, Kunlun Zhu, Zijie Lei, Jiaxun Zhang, Ziheng Qi, Kyle Richardson, and Jiaxuan You (*Core Contributors)

EMNLP 2025 (Demo)

Towards Direct Intent Manipulation: Drag-Based Research Ideation, Evaluation and Evolution

Zijian Ding, Fenghai Li, Haofei Yu, and Joel Chan

UIST 2025 Poster

Open Source Applications

Tiny Scientist

139
Core Contributor

A lightweight framework for building research agents designed for developers.

Live Trade Bench

168
Core Contributor

Live evaluation of AI trading agents in real time across US stocks and Polymarket.