Hi! I'm a final year PhD student at University of Washington with Luke Zettlemoyer. I work on NLP, and I'm specifically interested in LLM scaling and efficiency, as well as conditional compute methods and modular architectures.
Prior to my PhD, I was a Research Engineer at FAIR (then Facebook AI Research) in New York. During that time, I primarily worked on open domain dialogue, but also explored RL for agents in text-based games, text-to-multimodal adaptation, and mental health applications.
I am currently on the academic job market, seeking openings for tenure-track research professorship.
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, Primary Math & English
Terra Blevins, Tomasz Limisiewicz, Suchin Gururangan, Margaret Li, Hila Gonen, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer
arXiv PDF
Weijia Shi, Sewon Min, Maria Lomeli, Chunting Zhou, Margaret Li, Gergely Szilvasy, Rich James, Xi Victoria Lin, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer, Scott Yih, Mike Lewis
arXiv PDF
Suchin Gururangan*, Margaret Li*, Mike Lewis, Tim Althoff, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer
arXiv PDF
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
We've all heard "failure is normal" and "we all have imposter syndrome," but that isn't reflected in the curation of CVs and LinkedIn posts. So I've made what I wish I saw more of -- a 'failure' resume -- in an attempt to provide a little bit of practical grounding for these platitudes. I hope this helps you see my supposed failures, and yours, in a kinder light. So here are a few of the greatest hits 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 person.
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. Some choice phrases I've seen in my reviews are "not novel," "not interesting," "not significant," and "not convincing." The papers I am most proud of are often the ones I've had the most trouble submitting.
I went almost 3 years from 2019 - 2022 without completing a single first-author paper. I was doing research! I just got no results I felt were worth publishing. It turns out that research is full of setbacks, and some may stretch on for seemingly forever, but they do eventually end.
I enjoy running slowly with Race Condition Running (yeah it is a pun), and am a now-chronic marathoner. I also spend time walking to every bubble tea shop within 5 miles, singing mostly on-key, rewatching/rereading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and listening to people on Youtube talk about anything. I'm a prolific window-eater and actual eater (my Beli profile), when I find the time between boba runs.
I've decided to embrace life in the PNW by taking up hiking and snowboarding, or just walking around looking like I could go hiking or snowboarding. I'm always interested in learning about other people's hobbies, so if you meet me, please share yours!