Oliver Li

About Me

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Hi đź‘‹! I am Aochong Oliver Li (my friends usually call me Oliver), a second-year CS PhD student at Cornell University working with Prof. Tanya Goyal. Before that, I graduated from Columbia where I was advised by Prof. Zhou Yu and Prof. Smaranda Muresan. After college, I spent a year at AQR Capital as a quant researcher under Laura Serban.
I'm currently interested in designing synthetic data for pre- and mid-training, making agents better collaborators with humans, and mitigating CBRN risk and keeping increasingly capable models aligned.

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â–¶Recent News
2026/01Off-Trajectory Reasoning was accepted to ICLR 2026! 🎉
2026/05Check out my recent blog, Open Weight, Open Risk, on the CBRN risks of open-weight models.

Things I Love

  • The beauty of simplicity and intuition—this is what drew me into AI and mathematics.
  • I'm trying to spend more time on ambitious ideas, understanding the basics from first principles, and building mental models to handle noise in the world.
  • I love visiting art and history museums around the world—favorites so far are The Met and The British Museum.