Hi! I'm a PhD student at University of Washington with Luke Zettlemoyer and Tim Althoff. I work on NLP and Dialogue. I'm specifically interested in efficiently training and generating from large language models, controllability and safety, and applications to mental health.
Previously, I was a Research Engineer at Facebook AI Research (now Meta AI) in New York, mostly working on open domain dialogue.
CSE481DS Data Science Capstone
Zero-Knowledge Proofs; Introduction to Reinforcement Learning
Fundamentals of Computer Science
Combinatorics I & II
CIS160 Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science
(Discrete Maths & Graph Theory)
Various courses
AMC8 & MathCounts Competition Math
Various subjects: AP subject tests, SAT & SATII prep, ESL, Secondary Math
Margaret Li*, Suchin Gururangan*, Tim Dettmers, Mike Lewis, Tim Althoff, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer
arXiv PDF
Margaret Li*, Julian Michael*
ACL PDF
Danielle Rothermel, Margaret Li, Tim Rocktäschel, Jakob Foerster
arXiv PDF
Jing Xu, Da Ju, Margaret Li, Y-Lan Boureau, Jason Weston, Emily Dinan
arXiv PDF
Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Jack Urbanek, Margaret Li, Arthur Szlam, Tim Rocktäschel, Jason Weston.
arXiv PDF
Shrimai Prabhumoye*, Margaret Li*, Emily Dinan, Jack Urbanek, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston, Arthur Szlam.
arXiv PDF
Margaret Li, Stephen Roller, Ilia Kulikov, Sean Welleck, Spencer Poff, Emily Dinan, Y-Lan Boureau, Kyunghyun Cho, and Jason Weston.
arXiv PDF
Stephen Roller*, Y-Lan Boureau*, Jason Weston*, Antoine Bordes, Emily Dinan, Angela Fan, David Gunning, Da Ju, Margaret Li, Spencer Poff, Pratik Ringshia, Kurt Shuster, Eric Michael Smith, Arthur Szlam, Jack Urbanek, Mary Williamson.
arXiv PDF
Margaret Li, Jason Weston, and Stephen Roller.
arXiv PDF
Hannah Rashkin, Eric M. Smith, Margaret Li, and Y-Lan Boureau.
arXiv PDF
For all the generalities I've read and heard about failure being ok and imposter syndrome being universal, I so rarely get to see behind the curation of CVs and posts. So I've made what I wish I saw more of -- a 'failure' resume. But I do hope that you'll try to see my supposed failures, and yours, as vital and constructive building blocks of life. So here's an excerpt (such a small slice) of my career-related rejections and such since undergraduate.
There are plenty more for all other aspects of my life too, and I'm happy to chat about those, or anything listed below, in detail. Especially if I know you personally, feel free to reach out anytime to talk about what you're going through.
I transferred into CS from Bioengineering during undergrad and had never coded before. With less experience and coursework than many of my peers, I applied to > 100 internships during my undergraduate years and got rejected from them all -- except for Facebook, Google, and a startup my final summer.
I had 0 ML experience coming out of university, and when I tried to join FAIR, I was rejected the first time. A research scientist later accepted me on their team, and I'm super grateful to have gotten that opportunity despite there being more qualified engineers (who maybe had at least taken a Machine Learning course for their degree). But I was team-less for nearly 3 months, longer than anyone else I knew.
I struggled to ramp up on both engineering and machine learning knowledge at the same time, because of the aforementioned lack of experience in ...both. So I took longer to get my (mandatory) first promotion than anyone else I knew, including a negative rating the cycle before I did get the promotion.
I didn't get any kind of outreach or interview, didn't even get explicitly rejected. Got ghosted by a professor who had asked me to email them -- no hard feelings to that person, who is definitely very busy! But I did take it as negative personal feedback then.
I spent about 4-5 weeks of my life doing nothing but applying, and got exactly one interview over the course of 2 years. One fellowship, notably, gave me wildly opposite feedback the second year I applied compared to the first year, which just goes to show that the application readers aren't perfect and the process is super noisy.
Most got in on resubmission, but it didn't make the first rejection pleasant. Rebuttals can be extremely demoralizing, and reviewers can state their opinions as fact sometimes.
I went almost 3 years from 2019 - 2022 without writing a single first-author paper. I was doing research! I just got no results I felt were worth publishing.
When I'm not doing research or teaching, I enjoy walking to every bubble tea shop within 5 miles, singing mostly on-key, rewatching/rereading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, lifting heavy things and putting them down, and listening to people on Youtube talk about absolutely anything. I also spend far too much time online window-shopping and window-eating, which is exactly what it sounds like, in an attempt to limit my actual shopping and eating (the latter is a lost cause).
I've decided to do my best to fit in while living in the PNW by taking up hiking and snowboarding, or just walking around with hiking and snowboarding equipment. I'm always interested in new hobbies, so if you have a beginner- and klutz-friendly one to share, let me know :).