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