Fenghai Li

About

Hello! My name is Fenghai Li. I am a junior majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am currently a visiting research intern at the SALT Lab, working with Prof. Diyi Yang's group under the mentorship of Yanzhe Zhang. Previously, I was a research intern at the U Lab with Prof. Jiaxuan You, mentored by Haofei Yu. I have also worked on Human-AI Interaction under the mentorship of 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 centers on human–AI collaboration. I build and study language agents for open-ended, evolving tasks—especially scientific discovery— with the goal of making them both more capable and more effective collaborators for humans.

AI Agents. I develop methods, evaluations, and infrastructure for agents operating in dynamic environments. I am particularly interested in how agents anticipate what comes next—whether language models can forecast the research directions a community will pursue [IdeaForecastBench], or make decisions evaluated against live market outcomes [LiveTradeBench]. I also build flexible infrastructure for creating and steering research agents [TinyScientist].

Human-Centered AI. I design human-friendly, human-in-the-loop systems that help humans understand, steer, and refine agent behavior. My work explores interfaces that help human researchers navigate trade-offs across research ideas [ResearchCube] and directly manipulate the concepts underlying model outputs [Conceptual DM].