Lei Li

Assistant Professor, Language Technologies Institute

Lei Li is an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute (LTI). His research centers on advancing multilingual natural language processing (NLP), AI security, large language models, and AI-powered drug discovery and protein design. Dr. Li is particularly known for his work in developing scalable and efficient machine translation systems as well as LLM watermarking. His innovations include VolcTrans, a multilingual machine translation system that serves over 1 billion users speaking 100 languages and groundbreaking contributions to responsible AI development for large-scale applications.

Dr. Li earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, focusing on efficient algorithms for mining co-evolving time series, under the guidance of Prof. Christos Faloutsos. He also holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he graduated as part of the prestigious ACM Honored Class. Before joining CMU, Dr. Li held faculty positions at UC Santa Barbara and served as the founding director of the ByteDance AI Lab, where he led a large research and engineering team on projects spanning NLP, machine learning, and robotics.

At CMU, Dr. Li leads research initiatives at the intersection of language technologies and AI for science, while teaching advanced courses in multilingual NLP, LLM systems, and Generative AI for Biomedicine. His work has been recognized with numerous accolades, including the ACL Best Paper Award, multiple first-place wins in the WMT Machine Translation Competition, and the SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award (runner-up). Through his research, teaching, and community contributions, Dr. Li continues to push the boundaries of generative AI and its applications in solving real-world challenges.

Research Areas