Yingcong Li

Assistant Professor - Natural Language Processing, Data Science
Education
Ph.D.; University of Michigan; Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; 2025
M.S.; University of California, Riverside; Electrical and Computer Engineering; 2020
B.S.; University of Science and Technology of China; Electrical Engineering and Information Science; 2019
2026 Fall Courses
DS 701B - MASTER'S THESIS
DS 725 - INDEPENDENT STUDY I
DS 701C - MASTER'S THESIS
DS 790A - DOCT DISSERTATION & RES
DS 792B - PRE-DOCTORAL RESEARCH
DS 700B - MASTER'S PROJECT
DS 680 - NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
DS 488 - INDEPENDENT STUDY IN DS
DS 726 - INDEPENDENT STUDY II
CS 790A - DOCT DISSERTATION & RES
Past Courses
CS 474: INTRO TO GENAI - HONORS
DS 680: NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Conference Paper
"Memory as a Markov Matrix: Sample Efficient Knowledge Expansion via Token-to-Dictionary Mapping"
Forty-Third International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026), July (3rd Quarter/Summer), 2026.
Conference Proceeding
"BREAD: Branched Rollouts from Expert Anchors Bridge SFT & RL for Reasoning"
Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, Inc. (NeurIPS), 2025.
"When and How Unlabeled Data Provably Improve In-Context Learning"
Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, Inc. (NeurIPS), 2025.
"Fine-grained Analysis of In-context Linear Estimation: Data, Architecture, and Beyond"
Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation, Inc. (NeurIPS), 2024.
Journal Article
Yingcong Li, Samet Oymak. 2023. "Provable Pathways: Learning Multiple Tasks over Multiple Paths." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 37, no. 7, pp. 8701-8710.
Yuzhen Qin, Yingcong Li, Fabio Pasqualetti, Maryam Fazel, Samet Oymak. 2023. "Stochastic Contextual Bandits with Long Horizon Rewards." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 37, no. 8, pp. 9525-9533.
Xiangyu Chang, Yingcong Li, Samet Oymak, Christos Thrampoulidis. 2021. "Provable Benefits of Overparameterization in Model Compression: From Double Descent to Pruning Neural Networks." Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, vol. 35, no. 8, pp. 6974-6983.
Bin Niu, Jiawei Kong, Shaofei Tang, Yingcong Li, Zuqing Zhu. 2019. "Visualize Your IP-Over-Optical Network in Realtime: A P4-Based Flexible Multilayer In-Band Network Telemetry (ML-INT) System." IEEE Access, vol. 7, pp. 82413-82423.