My name is Cheng Li, and I am a Chinese girl with a deep fascination for advanced technologies that enhance our daily lives, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and computational linguistics. Over the past two years, I have conducted research exploring the cognitive mechanisms of LLMs (e.g., EmotionPrompt and NegativePrompt), multicultural understanding of LLMs (CultureLLM and CulturePark), and AI for healthcare (MentalArena). I was a research intern at UIUC advised by Prof. Heng Ji. And I have a long internship at Microsoft Research Asia advised by Prof. Xing Xie and Dr. Jindong Wang. Looking ahead, I aspire to contribute to more impactful and innovative work on large models.

Research Interests

• AI for Social Science: Unveiling Emotions in Generative AI (ICML 2024), NegativePrompt (IJCAI 2024), EmotionPrompt (LLM@IJCAI’23)
• Cultural Problems in Large Models: CultureLLM (NeurIPS 2024), CulturePark (NeurIPS 2024)
• AI for Healthcare: MentalArena (Submitted to ICLR 2025)

Publication

• [ICML 2024] The good, the bad, and why: Unveiling emotions in generative ai.
  Cheng Li, Jindong Wang, Yixuan Zhang, Kaijie Zhu, Xinyi Wang, Wenxin Hou, Jianxun Lian, Fang Luo, Qiang Yang, Xing Xie. [PDF]
  [Implemented by LlamaIndex] [Media coverage: 1, 2, 3, 4. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 10] [Reported by Forbes]
• [NeurIPS 2024] CultureLLM: Incorporating Cultural Differences into Large Language Models.
  Cheng Li, Mengzhuo Chen, Jindong Wang, Sunayana Sitaram, Xing Xie. [PDF]
• [NeurIPS 2024] CulturePark: Boosting Cross-cultural Understanding in Large Language Models.
  Cheng Li, Damien Teney, Linyi Yang, Qingsong Wen, Xing Xie, Jindong Wang. [PDF]
  [Media coverage: MIT Technology Review, Vitalbridge]
• [IJCAI 2024] NegativePrompt: Leveraging Psychology for Large Language Models Enhancement via Negative Emotional Stimuli.
  Xu Wang*, Cheng Li*, Yi Chang, Jindong Wang, Yuan Wu. [PDF] *: Co-first Authors
• [Arxiv 2024] MentalArena: Self-play Training of Language Models for Diagnosis and Treatment of Mental Health Disorders.
  Cheng Li, May Fung, Qingyun Wang, Chi Han, Manling Li, Jindong Wang, Heng Ji. [PDF]
• [LLM@IJCAI’23] Large language models understand and can be enhanced by emotional stimuli.
  Cheng Li, Jindong Wang, Yixuan Zhang, Kaijie Zhu, Wenxin Hou, Jianxun Lian, Fang Luo, Qiang Yang, Xing Xie. [PDF]
• [ICCV 2021] Vil-100: A new dataset and a baseline model for video instance lane detection.
  Yujun Zhang, Lei Zhu, Wei Feng, Huazhu Fu, Mingqian Wang, Qingxia Li, Cheng Li, Song Wang. [PDF]

Education

• Master, Major in Computer Science, Institute of Software, Chinese Academic of Sciences
• Bachelor, Major in Software Engineering, Tianjin University

Academic Reviews

• NeurIPS 2024: The Thirty-Eighth Neural Information Processing System
• ICLR 2024: The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations
• ICML 2025: The Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning

Award

• NeurIPS 2024 Scholar Award
• ICML 2024 Travel Award

Project

promptbench 2.5k

• Incorporated several representative prompt engineering approaches into an united project for researchers and users to use and evaluate their performance.

Personality and Hobbies

I’m easy-going and like to meet new friends, which is so interesting and fun!