I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Yale advised by Arman Cohan, where my research focuses on the intersection of natural language processing and reasoning. I’m passionate about building systems that can think more intelligently and communicate their reasoning — whether through natural or symbolic language. My research has been supported by Yale Graduate Fellowship, a Meta research grant and a Salesforce research grant.

At Yale, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with inspiring researchers on projects like FOLIO, P-FOLIO, HYBRIDMIND, and Scheherazade which aim to push the limits of how AI understands logic and context. Our work has gained recognition in both academic and industry circles. Outside of research, I’ve deeply enjoyed mentoring students, organizing conferences and workshops, and contributing to a more inclusive computer science community.

Previously, I interned at Google DeepMind and AWS, where I worked with fantastic teams to advance reasoning capabilities in large language models. I believe that powerful AI should also be transparent, interpretable, and aligned with human values.

I am fortunate to be supported by my wonderful thesis committee and collaborators in my academic journey:

  • Denny Zhou, founder and lead of the Reasoning Team at Google DeepMind.
  • R. Thomas McCoy, from the Department of Linguistics at Yale University.
  • Scott J. Shapiro, Charles F. Southmayd Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy.
  • Ruzica Piskac, leader of the Rigorous Software Engineering (ROSE) group at Yale.

I completed my B.Eng Computer Science degree in Nanyang Technological University, Singapore where I worked with Shafiq Rayhan Joty on text generation and summarization.
At NTU, I was awarded the Best Final Year Thesis Gold Medal.

Beyond academics, I enjoy portrait photography and have held multiple sessions for the Yale graduate and undergraduate communities. I also had the privilege of performing in an ensemble at Yale’s historic Woolsey Hall.

Recent talks

Advancing Reasoning in Large Language Models: from Fundamentals to Real-World Applications. Invited talk at UCSD, Nov 2024.
Advancing Reasoning in Large Language Models: from Fundamentals to Real-World Applications. Thesis prospectus talk at Yale, May 2024.

Publications

2025

2024

2023

2022

2021

2020

2019

Awards

  • Meta Research Grant 2024 on Complex Reasoning.
  • SM2 Scholarship, a full scholarship issued by Ministry of Education and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
  • National Physics Olympiad Second Prize, China.
  • Terrainier NUS Hackathon Top-8
  • Climate Oracle Yale-NUS hack4climate Datathon 2nd Place in the Data Science Category
  • Blinkception NTU Hackathon 2nd Prize

Services and Organization

Mentorship

If you are interested in collaborating with me, please complete the Recuriting Task and drop me an email!

  • Current: Frank Li (Yale CS & Math)
  • Past: Yilun Zhao (now at Yale CS), Zhenting Qi (now at Harvard Data Science), Hailey Schoelkopf (now at Anthropic), Wenfei Zhou (now at Nvidia)

Miscellaneous

  • I was a student of the wonderful Dragomir Radev.
  • Book list: Thinking Like a Lawyer by Frederick Schauer, Elements of Law, an Introduction to Metaphysics.
  • I have lived in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Los Angeles, Singapore, New Haven, New York, Mountain View, San Diego, Palo Alto and Redwood City.
  • Open Source Society Technical Director, Hackers for Charity Subcommittee