I’m a final-year 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 am currently also a Research Scientist Intern at the AI Frontier Reasoning team in Meta, working with Richard Yuanzhe Pang. 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.

I’m actively looking for postdoc and industrial research positions starting in summer/fall 2026, with the goal of pushing forward research in reasoning.

Media Coverage. At Yale, I’ve had the opportunity to collaborate with inspiring researchers on projects like FOLIO, BRAINTEASERS, 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 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.

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.

In addition to my academic pursuits, I am an amateur mezzo-soprano and a comedy enthusiast. I 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 CMU, April 2025.

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.

Selected Publications

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: 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