Yicong Li

I’m a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Harvard University, advised by Prof. Hanspeter Pfister in Visual Computing Group (VCG), with an M.S. in Bioengineering. I also work with Prof. Jeff W. Lichtman, Prof. Aravinthan D.T. Samuel, Prof. Dmitri “Mitya” B. Chklovskii, Prof. Jingpeng Wu, Prof. Bill Lotter, and Prof. Wanhua Li.

Previously, I obtained my master’s degree from Tsinghua University advised by Prof. Yang Li and my bachelor’s degree from Sichuan University’s Wu Yuzhang Honors College. During this period, I was fortunate to work with Prof. Nir Shavit and Prof. Lu Mi at MIT CSAIL, and Prof. Faisal Mahmood at Harvard Medical School.

I interned at Netflix, Genentech, Microsoft Research (with Dr. Kristen Severson), Simons Foundation’s Flatiron Institute, and Huawei (with Prof. Nanshan Zhong’s team).

I aim to develop bleeding-edge AI techniques to address important real-world challenges. My recent work explores:

• Vision-Language Model Post-Training: supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, in-context learning, and synthetic data generation.
• Self-Evolving Agentic Systems: automatic prompt/skill/workflow/harness optimization.
• Computer Vision: 2D & 3D image segmentation/restoration/compression, object detection, self-supervised learning, and vision foundation models.
• Generative Models: VAEs, GANs, and diffusion models.
• AI for Neuroscience: large-scale electron microscopy image analysis for connectomics.
• AI for Healthcare: computational pathology, respiratory disease screening and quality assurance, embryo viability prediction in IVF, and MRI/CT/X-ray image analysis.

I’m a recipient of the Laverack Family Innovation Fund Fellowship in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences from Harvard University and the prestigious (only 5) “Wang Wen Guo” scholarship from Sichuan University. My research has been featured in MIT News, Forbes, MarkTechPost, Computer Vision News, and ERCIM News.

I'm currently on the industry job market — feel free to reach out!