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Zhaonan Li

I am a second-year PhD student in Computer Science at ASU SCAI, advised by Prof. Ben Zhou.

I work in the space of NLP, LLMs, and reasoning. My current research focuses on visual reasoning.

I received my B.S. degrees (summa cum laude) in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Brandeis University and my M.S. degree in Computer Science from Columbia University.

Email  /  GitHub  /  LinkedIn

News
Jan 2025

One paper accpeted at ICLR 2025 and one paper accepted at NAACL!

Publications
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Unbiased Visual Reasoning with Controlled Visual Inputs


Zhaonan Li*, Shijie Lu*, Fei Wang, Jacob Dineen, Xiao Ye, Zhikun Xu, Siyi Liu, Young Min Cho, Bangzheng Li, Daniel Chang, Kenny Nguyen, Qizheng Yang, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou
Under review at ICLR 2026

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CC-LEARN: Cohort-based Consistency Learning


Xiao Ye, Zhaonan Li, Jacob Dineen, Zhikun Xu, Shijie Lu, Ming Shen, Shaswat Shrivastava, Avneet Ahuja, Ben Zhou
Under review at ICLR 2026
arxiv /

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QA-LIGN: Aligning LLMs through Constitutionally Decomposed QA


Jacob Dineen, Aswin RRV, Qin Liu, Zhikun Xu, Xiao Ye, Ming Shen, Zhaonan Li, Shijie Lu, Chitta Baral, Muhao Chen, Ben Zhou
EMNLP 2025 (findings)
arxiv /

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SysCaps: Language Interfaces for Simulation Surrogates of Complex Systems


Patrick Emami, Zhaonan Li*, Saumya Sinha*, Truc Nguyen*
ICLR 2025
arxiv / code /

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ToW: Thoughts of Words Improve Reasoning in Large Language Models


Zhikun Xu*, Ming Shen*, Jacob Dineen, Zhaonan Li, Xiao Ye, Shijie Lu, Aswin RRV, Chitta Baral, Ben Zhou
NAACL 2025
arxiv / code /





Design and source code from Jon Barron's website