💫 About Me
Hi there!👋
Welcome to the homepage of Yushu Li (李昱澍)!
I am a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and a Ph.D. Student Researcher at the Vector Institute. At UBC, I am a member of the Trusted and Efficient AI (TEA) Lab, advised by Prof. Xiaoxiao Li.
Previously, I obtained my M.Eng. in Information and Communication Engineering from the South China University of Technology (SCUT), supervised by Prof. Kui Jia and co-supervised by Dr. Xun Xu. I was also a visiting student at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR, Singapore, working with Dr. Xun Xu and Dr. Xulei Yang. I received my B.Eng. from the School of Electronic and Information Engineering, SCUT.
My research focuses on Large Language Models, Reinforcement Learning, LLM Agents, and Test-Time Adaptation. I am open to collaboration with researchers and engineers across academia and industry.
📫 Feel free to reach out: yushul@student.ubc.ca
📄 My resume can be found here.
🔥 News
- 2026.07: ⛵️ I will join Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an Applied Scientist Intern in Cupertino.
- 2026.05: 🥳 Two papers have been accepted at ICML 2026, including work on stable agentic reinforcement learning and retrieval-augmented LVLMs.
- 2026.05: ✨ Our work on mitigating reward hacking through directional alignment is accepted at ICML 2026 AIWild.
- 2026.03: ✨ Our new preprint, Spend Less, Reason Better: Budget-Aware Value Tree Search for LLM Agents, is now available online.
- 2026.01: 🥳 Our work on Token Hidden Reward has been accepted at ICLR 2026.
- 2025.09: 🏅 Awarded the Four Year Fellowship at UBC.
- 2025.09: ⛵️ Joined the Trusted and Efficient AI (TEA) Lab at UBC and became a Ph.D. Student Researcher at the Vector Institute.
- 2025.07: 🎉 One paper has been accepted at ICCV 2025. Congratulations to Tiankai!
- 2025.01: 🥳 Two papers have been accepted at ICLR 2025.
- 2025.01: 🎉 I am serving as a reviewer for ICME 2025 and TMLR.
- 2024.12: 🥳 Our work on Exploring Human-in-the-Loop Test-Time Adaptation by Synergizing Active Learning and Model Selection is accepted by Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR).
- 2024.12: ✨ Our new preprint titled Efficient and Context-Aware Label Propagation for Zero-/Few-Shot Training-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Model is now available online.
- 2024.12: 🎉 I am serving as a reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI).
- 2024.12: 🎉 I will be serving as a reviewer for ICML 2025.
- 2024.10: ✨ Our new preprint titled On the Adversarial Risk of Test Time Adaptation: An Investigation into Realistic Test-Time Data Poisoning is now available online.
- 2024.09: 🎓 I have completed my SIPGA program at I2R, A*STAR, Singapore.
- 2024.08：🎉 I will be serving as a reviewer for ICLR 2025.
- 2024.05: ✨ New preprint on Exploring Human-in-the-Loop Test-Time Adaptation by Synergizing Active Learning and Model Selection is available on arXiv.
- 2024.03: ⛵️ Starting my visiting student program “Singapore Inernational Pre-graduate Award (SIPGA)” at I2R, A*STAR, Singapore.
- 2023.07: 🥳 Our work on On the Robustness of Open-World Test-Time Training: Self-Training with Dynamic Prototype Expansion is accepted by ICCV 2023 as Oral presentation (1.8% acceptance rate).
📝 Publications
💥Spend Less, Reason Better: Budget-Aware Value Tree Search for LLM Agents
Yushu Li*, Wenlong Deng*, Jiajin Li, Xiaoxiao Li
arXiv preprint, 2026.
💥On Group Relative Policy Optimization Collapse in Agent Search: The Lazy Likelihood-Displacement
Wenlong Deng*, Yushu Li*, Boying Gong*, Yi Ren, Christos Thrampoulidis, Xiaoxiao Li
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026.
💥When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs
Beidi Zhao, Wenlong Deng, Xinting Liao, Yushu Li, Nazim Shaikh, Yao Nie, Xiaoxiao Li
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026.
💥Directional Alignment Mitigates Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learning for Language Models
Wenlong Deng, Jiaji Huang, Kaan Ozkara, Yushu Li, Christos Thrampoulidis, Xiaoxiao Li, Youngsuk Park
ICML 2026 AIWild, 2026.
💥Token Hidden Reward: Steering Exploration-Exploitation in Group Relative Deep Reinforcement Learning
Wenlong Deng, Yi Ren, Yushu Li, Boying Gong, Danica J. Sutherland, Xiaoxiao Li, Christos Thrampoulidis
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2026.
💥Exploiting Vision Language Model for Training-Free 3D Point Cloud OOD Detection via Graph Score Propagation
Tiankai Chen, Yushu Li, Adam Goodge, Tianrui Li, Fei Teng, Xulei Yang, Xun Xu
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.
💥Efficient and Context-Aware Label Propagation for Zero-/Few-Shot Training-Free Adaptation of Vision-Language Model
Yushu Li*, Yongyi Su*, Adam Goodge, Kui Jia, Xun Xu
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
💥On the Adversarial Risk of Test Time Adaptation: An Investigation into Realistic Test-Time Data Poisoning
Yongyi Su*, Yushu Li*, Kui Jia, Chuan-Sheng Foo, Xun Xu
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
Exploring Human-in-the-Loop Test-Time Adaptation by Synergizing Active Learning and Model Selection
Yushu Li*, Yongyi Su*, Xulei Yang, Kui Jia, Xun Xu
Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2024.
On the Robustness of Open-World Test-Time Training: Self-Training with Dynamic Prototype Expansion
Yushu Li, Xun Xu, Yongyi Su and Kui Jia
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023
(Oral presentation 1.8% acceptance rate)
Dynamic Shuffle: An Efficient Channel Mixture Method
Kaijun Gong, Zhuowen Yin, Yushu Li, Kailing Guo, Xiangmin Xu
Preprint, 2023.
💻 Internships
- Starting 2026.07, Incoming Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cupertino, USA.
- 2024.03 - 2024.09, Visiting Student, Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore. Mentor: Drs. Xun Xu and Xulei Yang.
🎖 Honors and Awards
- Four Year Fellowship, The University of British Columbia (2025-2029)
- University-level Scholarship, South China University of Technology (2019-2025)
🎓 Education
- 2025.09 - now, Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), The University of British Columbia (UBC), Canada
- 2022.09 - 2025.06, M.Eng. in Information and Communication Engineering, South China University of Technology (SCUT), China
- 2018.09 - 2022.06, B.Eng. in Information Engineering, South China University of Technology (SCUT), China
📖 Academic Service
- Conference Reviewer: ACM MM, NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, ICME, CVPR
- Journal Reviewer: TIP, TMLR, TPAMI
🛠 Skills
- Programming: Python, PyTorch, C/C++, MATLAB, LaTeX
- Languages: Native Chinese speaker; fluent in English
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