Hi! I'm a final year PhD student at the 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.
Margaret Li*, Suchin Gururangan*, Tim Dettmers, Mike Lewis, Tim Althoff, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer
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Suchin Gururangan*, Margaret Li*, Mike Lewis, Tim Althoff, Noah A. Smith, Luke Zettlemoyer
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Liwei Jiang, Yuanjun Chai, Margaret Li, Mickel Liu, Raymond Fok, Nouha Dziri, Yulia Tsvetkov, Maarten Sap, Yejin Choi
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Margaret Li*, Weijia Shi*, Artidoro Pagnoni, Peter West, Ari Holtzman
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Artidoro Pagnoni, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Pedro Rodriguez, John Nguyen, Benjamin Muller, Margaret Li, Chunting Zhou, Lili Yu, Jason E Weston, Luke Zettlemoyer, Gargi Ghosh, Mike Lewis, Ari Holtzman, Srini Iyer.
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Margaret Li*, Sneha Kudugunta*, Luke Zettlemoyerr
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Atindra Jha*, Margaret Li*, Jure Leskovec, Percy Liang, Luke Zettlemoyer
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Margaret Li, Sneha Kudugunta, Danielle Rothermel, Luke Zettlemoyer
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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
It's easy for me to say "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 from Bioengineering to CS 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, not even coursework. When I tried to join FAIR, I was rejected initially in favor of another candidate who had ML research experience. 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. 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 a very busy person with a crowded inbox! But I did take it as negative personal feedback then.
I spent about 5 weeks of my first two years doing nothing but applying, and got exactly one interview over the course of 2 years. One fellowship gave me wildly opposite feedback the second year I applied compared to the first year, which just goes to show that the application readers are inconsistent and the entire 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 "lacks novelty," "not very 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 positive results I felt were worth publishing. (In retrospect, I should have written up my negative results, some of which I still think are really fascinating.) 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 have embraced my new identity as a chronic middle-of-the-pack marathoner. The PNW made me take up hiking and snowboarding, or just walking around looking like I could go hiking or snowboarding. 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'm always interested in learning about other people's hobbies, so if you meet me, please share yours!