Fenghai Li
Welcome
HiHi

Full-stack developer and researcher at UIUC, interested in Language Agents, Human-AI Interaction, and AI for Science.

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). Currently, I am working as a Research Intern at the U Lab with Prof. Jiaxuan You. My research interests include Language Agents, Human-AI Interaction, AI for Science, and AI for Research.

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.

Interests

Research

Language Agents

Building autonomous agents that can reason, plan, and act in the real world. My work focuses on making agents more reliable, controllable, and composable — especially for open-ended tasks like scientific research and financial decision-making.

Human-AI Interaction

Designing interfaces that let humans and language agents collaborate productively. I'm interested in how direct manipulation, trade-off exploration, and mixed-initiative interaction can turn LLMs into tools that amplify human thinking rather than replace it.

Open Source

Projects

Tiny Scientist

132
Core Contributor

A lightweight framework for building research agents designed for developers.

Live Trade Bench

110
Core Contributor

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

Papers

Publications

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)

The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP'25), System Demonstrations

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

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

Adjunct Proceedings of the 2025 Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST'25 Poster), 2025