Liu Leqi

Welcome! I am an AI researcher currently focusing on understanding and developing large language models. My overarching research goal is to build controllable machine intelligence that serves humanity safely. To achieve this, my work spans three key areas: (1) investigating the foundations of state-of-the-art machine intelligence, with a particular focus on generative AI systems; (2) designing principled frameworks for human-centered machine learning that model human preferences and behaviors, integrating these models into machine learning pipelines for applications such as healthcare, recommender systems, and education; and (3) evaluating and auditing the societal impacts of large-scale AI systems, including large language models and recommender systems.

I hold appointments as an Assistant Professor in use-inspired AI at the Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management, a core member of the Machine Learning Laboratory, and a Graduate Studies Committee member in both the Computer Science Department and the Oden Institute at UT Austin.

I seek motivated students with similar research interests to join the lab, particularly in exploring the generalization behaviors of large language models. Please check out the lab website before reaching out!

Past Experience: I obtained my Ph.D. from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in 2023, where I was advised by Zachary Lipton. During my Ph.D., I interned at Google DeepMind London in Summer 2022, working on human-centered mechanism design, and at Apple Siri in Summer 2019. I was an Open Philanthropy AI Fellow from 2020 to 2023, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton Language and Intelligence from 2023 to 2024. My Bachelor’s degrees are in Computer Science from Bryn Mawr College and Mathematics from Haverford College. During my undergrad, I spent a wonderful semester at AIT-Budapest in Spring 2016.