Michael Li
I'm an incoming PhD student in CS at Northeastern University advised by David Bau and Byron Wallace. I previously studied statistics and machine learning at CMU.
I'm interested in developing our scientific understanding of neural networks, mostly by studying the underlying mechanisms and representations they learn. More broadly, I'm excited by foundational questions about phenomena in deep learning, e.g. generalization, emergent capabilities, scaling laws, and so on.
News
Joining Northeastern University as a CS PhD student in Fall 2026!
How Much Do Circuits Tell Us? Measuring the Consistency and Specificity of Language Model Circuits won a best paper award (preliminary track) at the LTI Student Research Symposium.
Model Internal Sleuthing was accepted to ACL 2026 (Main).
Presented BERTology in the Modern World at the Interplay workshop at COLM 2025.
Publications
Michael Li, Nishant Subramani.
Under review, 2026.
Michael Li, Nishant Subramani.
ACL, 2026.
Michael Li, Nishant Subramani.
Workshop on the Interplay of Model Behavior and Model Internals, COLM, 2025.
Michael Li, Fatemeh Esfahani, Li Xing, Xuekui Zhang.
Journal of Global Health, 2023.