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.
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.
Projects
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