• Exploration (data collection in RL)
• Value function and policy learning (training in RL)
• Off-policy learning (evaluation in RL)
• Applications to the Web
• Applications to NLP/LLM

More information can be found in Google Scholar, DBLP, LinkedIn.

Somewhat up-to-date CV (academic style), resume (industry style), and short bio.

I am also on Twitter as @LihongLi20.

• Recent and upcoiming events
  • [2025/10] Panel on Future of RL at Alignment 2025 (Plug and Play & Valley101 Annual Tech Summit), Sunnyvale, CA.
  • [2025/03] Keynote on "Model Alignment Towards an Expert Shopping Assistant", at AI+Robotics Research Symposium, Austin, TX.
  • [2025/01] Panel on "Bridge Theory and Practice" at NSF Workshop on Reinforcement Learning, Boston, MA.
  • [2024/01] Panel at the AAAI 2024 Workshop: Synergy of Reinforcement Learning and Large Language Models, Vancouver, Canada.
  • [2023/09] Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering 2023 Symposium of the National Academy of Engineering, at the Univ of Colorado.
  • [2023/05] Amazon Science & Technology Summit in San Francisco.
  • [2023/05] Seoul Test of Time Award by IW3C2, for our WWW'2010 paper on contextual bandits for personalized recommendation. See the article by Amazon Science.
  • [2022/01] Article by Amazon Science on how we use RL to delight customers in Amazon, and more. [link]
  • [2021/08] Invited talk at KDD Workshop on Multi-Armed Bandits and Reinforcement Learning (with Yi Liu). [slides]
  • [2021/07] Co-organizer of ICML Workshop on RL for Real Life.
  • [2021/07] Minitutorial on Optimization in Policy Gradient (with Lin Xiao) at the SIAM Conference on Optimization.
  • [2021/04] Amazon Advertising opens the Early-career Scientist program with full-time research positions. Application deadline: May 14.
  • [2020/12/15] Invited talk at AI for Economics Seminar.
  • [2020/12/12] Co-organizer of NeurIPS Workshop on Offline Reinforcement Learning.
  • [2020/10] Invited talk at Department of Computer Science, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
  • [2020/09] Co-organizer of Simons Institute's Deep Reinforcement Learning workshop, as part of the Theory of Reinforcement Learning program.
  • [2020/09] Invited talk at Department of Statistics and Data Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA.
  • [2020/04 (cancelled)] Invited talk at Reinforcement Learning workshop at the DALI (Data, Learning and Inference) meeting, Balearic Islands, Spain.
  • [2019/03 (cancelled)] Invited talk at CISS, Princeton, NJ, USA.
  • [2019/12] Co-organizer of NeurIPS Workshop on the Optimization Foundations of Reinforcement Learning, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
  • [2019/10] Machine Learning Journal Special Issue on "Reinforcement Learning for Real Life". Paper deadline: March 15, 2020. Please consider submitting to it! (CFP)
  • [2019/10] Invited talk at University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
  • [2019/10] Invited talk at DeepMind, Edmonton, AB, Canada
  • [2019/08] Invited talk at Simons Institute's Emerging Challenges in Deep Learning workshop.
  • [2019/06] Co-organizer of ICML Workshop on RL for Real Life, Long Beach, CA, USA.
  • [2019/04] Invited talk at GSO Spring Seminar, Department of Statistics, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
  • [2018/12] Invited talk at NIPS Workshop on Wordplay: Reinforcement and Language Learning in Text-based Games, Montreal, QC, Canada.
  • [2018/10] Invited talk at MADDD, University of California, Davis, CA, USA.
  • [2018/09] Invited talk at University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA.
  • [2018/07] Tutorial on ``Neural Approaches to Conversational AI'' (with Jianfeng Gao and Michel Galley) at ACL, Melbourne, Australia. [PPT, PDF]
  • [2018/07] Tutorial on ``Neural Approaches to Conversational AI'' (with Jianfeng Gao and Michel Galley) at SIGIR, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
  • [2018/07] Invited talk at ISMP, Bordeaux, France.
  • [2018/06] Invited talk at INFORMS, Taipei.
  • [2018/06] Invited talk at Machine Learning Theory Workshop, Peking University, Beijing, China.
  • [2018/04] Guest lecture at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
  • [2018/03] Invited talk at CISS, Princeton, NJ, USA.
  • [2018/02] Invited talk at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
  • [2017/12] Co-organizer of NIPS Workshop on From "What If" to "What Next", Long Beach, CA, USA.
  • [2017/11] Co-organizer of the AI Frontiers conference, San Jose, CA, USA.
  • [2017/09] Invited talk at Google Brain, Montreal, Canada.
  • [2017/08] Invited talk at ICML Workshop on Interactive Machine Learning and Semantic Information Retrieval, Sydney, Australia.
  • [2017/06] Invited talk at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea.
  • [2017/06] Invited talk at Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon, Korea.
  • [2017/06] Invited talk at RLDM, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
  • [2017/05] Co-organizer of Algorithms for Reinforcement Learning Minisymposium at SIAM Optimization Conference, Vancouver, Canada.
  • [2017/05] Invited talk at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
  • [2017/05] Invited talk at New York University, New York, NY, USA.
  • [2017/02] Invited talk at Simons Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA.
• Recent duties as Senior Area Chair: ICLR (2022-2024), ICML (2021-2024), NeurIPS (2021, 2023-2024), and RLC (2024-2025).
• Editorial board of Transactions on Machine Learning Research; (formerly) IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI).