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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.