Zhiqi Li

Zhiqi Li

NVIDIA Research

I am a Research Scientist at NVIDIA Research, based in Singapore. Previously, I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from Nanjing University, advised by Prof. Tong Lu.

Currently, I am working on frontier VLM/VLA models at NVIDIA. Previously we developed Project Eagle. Eagle has contributed to NVIDIA Nemotron VLMs and NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1.

During my Ph.D., I focused on autonomous driving, where I developed BEVFormer, a widely recognized method in the field. I have also won three consecutive championships in autonomous driving challenges at CVPR 2022, 2023, and 2024.

I am also the first Ph.D. student from a Chinese institution awarded the NVIDIA PhD Fellowship.

🔔 We are hiring interns to work on VLM/VLA models for NVIDIA flagship projects! Contact: zhiqil@nvidia.com (December 2025)

🔥 News

📝 Publications and Reports

Arxiv
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Eagle 2: Building Post-Training Data Strategies from Scratch for Frontier Vision-Language Models

Zhiqi Li, Guo Chen, Shilong Liu, Shihao Wang, Vibashan VS, Yishen Ji, Shiyi Lan, Hao Zhang, Yilin Zhao, Subhashree Radhakrishnan, Nadine Chang, Karan Sapra, Amala Sanjay Deshmukh, Tuomas Rintamaki, Matthieu Le, Ilia Karmanov, Lukas Voegtle, Philipp Fischer, De-An Huang, Timo Roman, Tong Lu, Jose M Alvarez, Bryan Catanzaro, Jan Kautz, Andrew Tao, Guilin Liu, Zhiding Yu

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  • This work focuses on developing open-source vision-language models by emphasizing data strategy in post-training, resulting in the performant Eagle2 models that achieve state-of-the-art results across various multimodal benchmarks.

🎖 Honors and Awards