Manling Li

Manling Li is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University. She previously served as a postdoc at Stanford University's Vision and Learning Lab under Prof. Jiajun Wu and received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (advisor: Prof. Heng Ji). Her research spans Language + Vision + Robotics with applications in Embodied AI and AI for Science.

• Key Research Areas: Knowledgeable Foundation Models, Reasoning & Planning, Compositionality, Multimodal Knowledge Extraction, Factuality & Trustworthiness in AI
• Leadership Roles: Organizing Committee for ACL 2025, NAACL 2025, EMNLP 2024

Research Trends in her 15 most recent publications show:

• Advancing Embodied AI through structured reasoning and planning frameworks
• Developing Vision-Language Models for 3D layout optimization and video understanding
• Addressing LLM Hallucinations via knowledge shadowing and mechanistic interpretability
• Creating collaborative agent systems with out-of-sync recovery mechanisms

Scientific Recognition:

• ACL 2024 Outstanding Paper
• SoCal NLP 2024 Best Paper
• Microsoft Research Fellowships (PhD & Postdoc)
• DARPA Riser & EE CS Rising Star

Advising Impact: Mentored 19 students in developing the UIUC information extraction system. Currently advising 12 students across PhD, Master's, and undergraduate levels, with particular emphasis on supporting underrepresented groups. Led teams to rank 1st in DARPA AIDA evaluations.