Fenghai Li

About

Hello! My name is Fenghai Li. I am a junior majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am currently a visiting research intern at the SALT Lab, working with Prof. Diyi Yang's group under the mentorship of Yanzhe Zhang. Previously, I was a research intern at the U Lab with Prof. Jiaxuan You, mentored by Haofei Yu. I have also worked on Human-AI Interaction under the mentorship of Zijian Ding.

I'm always enthusiastic about collaborating with researchers from diverse fields. If you're interested in working together, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Research Interests

My research interests center on Human–AI Collaboration: how language agents can help people work more productively and creatively—not by replacing them, but by working alongside them. I am particularly interested in designing and evaluating Human–AI systems for scientific discovery, portfolio management, and other open-ended tasks.

My work to date has explored these questions in three directions:

Evaluation in live environments. I have evaluated language agents in live, evolving settings with measurable outcomes, using financial markets as a testbed [LiveTradeBench].

Research-agent infrastructure. I have helped build extensible frameworks for creating, customizing, and steering research agents [TinyScientist].

Interfaces for research ideation. I have designed interfaces that help researchers explore trade-offs among ideas [ResearchCube] and directly manipulate and refine underlying concepts [Conceptual DM].