Lei Li

Lei Li is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (LTI) within the School of Computer Science. He also holds affiliations with CMU CyLab and CPCB, as well as the University of California Santa Barbara Computer Science Department.

His educational background includes a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where he worked under Prof. Christos Faloutsos on efficient algorithms for mining co-evolving time series, and a B.S. in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University's prestigious ACM Honored Class.

Dr. Li's research centers on multilingual natural language processing, AI security, large language models, and AI-powered drug discovery and protein design. He is particularly known for developing VolcTrans, a multilingual machine translation system serving over 1 billion users across 100 languages, and for his groundbreaking work on LLM watermarking. His lab focuses on building tools to facilitate communication across the world's languages and advancing science through AI.

His publication record shows consistent output at top AI conferences including NeurIPS, ACL, EMNLP, ICML, and ICLR, with recent work spanning LLM security, multilingual capabilities, protein design, and watermarking techniques. The trends in his recent publications indicate an increasing focus on the intersection of language technologies and biomedical applications.

• ACL Best Paper Award
• Multiple first-place wins in WMT Machine Translation Competition
• SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award (runner-up)
• Vocabulary Learning via Optimal Transport for Neural Machine Translation (ACL 2021 Best Paper)

Dr. Li advises several students at CMU including Siqi Ouyang, Zhenqiao Song, Danqing Wang, Kexun Zhang, and Ramith Hettiarachchi (from CMU Computational Bio Department), as well as Wenda Xu from UC Santa Barbara. He teaches advanced courses including Large Language Model Systems and Generative AI for Biomedicine. Prior to CMU, he held faculty positions at UC Santa Barbara and served as founding director of the ByteDance AI Lab.