bio photo

Sharon Li

[CV]
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Sciences
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Office: CS5393

 G. Scholar LinkedIn Github Twitter e-Mail

About


I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Madison . I am a member of machine learning@uw-madison and a faculty affiliate with the Data Science Institute . Previously I was as a postdoc researcher in the Computer Science department at Stanford University , working with Christopher RĂ© . I completed my PhD from Cornell University in 2017, where I was fortunate to be advised by John E. Hopcroft .


My research focuses on algorithmic and theoretical foundations of safe and reliable AI, addressing challenges in both model development and deployment in the open world. This involves handling out-of-distribution data, quantifying uncertainty and learning novel structures and categories therein. Currently, our emphasis is on building responsible foundation models, such as large language models and vision-language models. We are driven to deeply understand how they work, when they fail, and effectively align them with human needs and desires.


[Openings] : I am looking for creative and curiosity-driven minds to join my lab, with fully funded positions. The admission decision at UW-Madison is committee-based. For questions regarding the application process, please see the FAQ . I highly recommend reading my [Advising Statement ] before you apply or email me.



Updates


12/3/2024 : I will be co-organizing two workshops at ICLR 2025 on responsible AI and uncertainty quantification for LLM.
11/1/2024 : Will be presenting 6 works at NeurIPS - see you in Vancouver!
5/1/2024 : 4 papers accepted by ICML 2024, congratulations to Xuefeng, Froilan, Shawn and Yifei!
1/16/2024 : 4 papers accepted by ICLR 2024.
9/12/2023 : Honored to be named "Innovator of the Year" by MIT Technology Review , highlighted among the TR35 cohort this year.
7/19/2023 : Yiyou defended his Ph.D. thesis - congratulations Dr. Sun!
6/26/2023 : Received funding from ONR to support OOD detection research - thanks ONR!
6/21/2023 : Received NSF CAREER Award on "Foundations of Human-Centered Machine Learning in the Wild".
4/24/2023 : 3 papers accepted by ICML. Congratulations team!
2/11/2023 : Xuefeng received the inaugural Jane Street Graduate Research Fellowship .
12/14/2022 : Grateful to receive the AFOSR Young Investigator (YIP) Award , sponsoring our work on "Human-Aligned Learning in the Open World (HALLOW)".
11/21/2022 : Received NeurIPS Outstanding Paper Award .
11/11/2022 : Excited to receive funding from Center for Advancing Safety of Machine Intelligence (CASMI), and partner on safe AI research.
11/2022 : Received Google-Initiated Research Grant.
9/14/2022 : 4 papers accpeted to NeurIPS 2022 and 1 paper accepted to NeurIPS 2022 Datasets and Benchmarks Track. Congrats to the team and co-authors!
8/26/2022 : Received Amazon Research Award .
6/8/2022 : Received American Family Funding Intiative Award .
5/15/2022 : 4 papers accepted by ICML, congratulations to the team!
4/15/2022 : Received ICLR Outstanding Paper Award Honorable Mention .

[Services] :

  • Area chair and senior program committee : NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML and AAAI.
  • Asscociate editor : ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD), Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)
  • Program chair and founding organizer : ICML Workshop on Uncertainty and Robustness in Deep Learning (UDL) 2019 & 2020.
  • Co-organizer : ICML Workshop on Uncertainty and Robustness in Deep Learning (UDL), 2021.
  • Co-organizer : ICML Workshop on Distribution-free Uncertainty Quantification (DFUQ), 2021.
  • Co-organizer : WiML Un-Workshop on Uncertainty Estimation , 2021.
  • Co-organizer : ICML Workshop on Distribution-free Uncertainty Quantification (DFUQ), 2022.
  • Co-organizer : NeurIPS Workshop on Robustness in Sequence Modeling , 2022.
  • Co-organizer : ICCV Tutorial on Reliability of Deep Learning for Real-World Deployment , 2023.
  • Co-organizer : CVPR Workshop on Prompting in Vision , 2024.
  • Co-organizer : DCAI: Data-centric Artificial Intelligence Workshop at WWW , 2024.

  • [Recent Talks] :

  • 11/1/2024: Invited talk at Center for the Humanities at UW-Madison
  • 10/11/2024: Invited talk at Department of Statistics and Data Science at Northwestern University
  • 7/29/2024: Invited talk at ELLIS Robust LLMs Workshop at Oxford University
  • 5/13/2024: Invited talk at ICRA workshop "Back to the Future: Robot Learning Going Probabilistic"
  • 12/7/2023: Talk at Machine Learning Lunch Meeting (MLLM) at UW-Madison
  • 12/6/2023: Invited speaker at MIT Technology Review's TR35 Festival
  • 11/6/2023: Invited talk at TEDxUWMadison [Video]
  • 10/9/2023: Invited talk at Vanderbilt Machine Learning Seminar
  • 10/3/2023: Invited talk at ICCV'23 BRAVO Workshop
  • 10/2/2023: Invited talk at ICCV'23 AROW Workshop
  • 8/16/2023: Invited talk at University of Queensland Data Science Seminar
  • 7/28/2023: Mentor at Women in Machine Learning (WiML) Workshop
  • 6/30/2023: Panelist of AI from Foundations to Applications hosted by UW-Madison
  • 6/18/2023: Invited talk at CVPR'23 Workshop on Anomaly Detection
  • 5/6/2023: Invited talk at MIT conference on MI and AI safety
  • 4/14/2023: Invited talk at Computer Vision Round Table (CVRT) at UW-Madison
  • 4/12/2023: Invited talk at KAUST computer vision group
  • 2/10/2023: Invited talk at Cornell AI Seminar


  • [Teaching] :

  • Fall 2023 : CS762 Advanced Deep Learning
  • Fall 2022 : CS762 Advanced Deep Learning
  • Spring 2022 : CS540 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
  • Fall 2021 : CS762 Advanced Deep Learning
  • Spring 2021 : CS540 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
  • Fall 2020 : CS839 Advanced Topics in Deep Learning .

  • Misc
    I travel and occasionally take photos. Here is my pictorial Travel Memo . This is the treasure I shoot with.


    Sponsors We are thankful for the generous funding award and gift from the following sponsors: sponsor