Jing Li 李菁

Associate Professor
Department of Computing
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Address
PQ 714, Mong Man Wai Building
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Hung Hom, Kowloon
Hong Kong SAR, China

Email
jing-amelia.li [AT] polyu [DOT] edu [DOT] hk

  
News

  • [NEW] Our recent model, Praxis‑VLM, focused on text‑only training for situational decision‑making, was accepted to NeurIPS 2025. It uses synthesized textual situations to overcome the scarcity of visual data for vision‑grounded reasoning and decision‑making data. Congratulations to Zhe! [Paper] [Github] [Hugging Face]
  • I’m excited to work with a wonderful team of research students and staff. If you’re interested in joining us as a PhD student, Research Associate, Research Assistant, or Post‑doc, please send your CV. Due to the high volume of emails, I may not be able to reply to everyone, but shortlisted candidates will hear back within a week; feel free to follow up if needed.

    • Biography

    Professor Jing Li is an Associate Professor and the Founder of the PolyU Embodied Artificial Intelligence Lab in the Department of Computing at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Promoted from Assistant Professor (2019–2025), she earned her Ph.D. from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017 and previously served as a Senior Researcher at Tencent AI Lab. Her research spans natural language processing and embodied artificial intelligence. Her research work has been regularly published in top-tier venues with competitive funding supports from the NSFC, RGC, and ITF, alongside collaborations with Huawei, Baidu, and Tencent. Her text embedding model AnglE (ACL 2024) achieves million-scale monthly downloads on Hugging Face and powers applications at Together.AI and MongoDB, while her decompilation-focused LLM4Decompile (EMNLP 2024) has gained significant impact with 6k GitHub stars.

    Research Topics

    • Pre-training and Language Representation Learning
    • Natural Language Understanding (NLU) for Social Media Contents
    • Human-Centered Natural Language Processing (NLP)
    • Large Language Models for Embodied Agents
    Selected Projects (as PI/PC)

    • Aug 2024 - Jul 2029: PolyU Embodied Artificial Intelligence Lab. Gift Fund from Boyushenhang.
    • Jul 2024 - Jun 2026: Simultaneous Translation for Multilingual Meetings. Gift Fund from Microware (Co-PIs: Dr. Jibin Wu and Dr. Yancheng Yuan)
    • Jun 2024 - May 2025: Socially-Aligned Large Language Model and Its Applications. Gift Fund from Huawei.
    • Apr 2023 - Apr 2026: AI-Care: A Multimodal Financial Assistant for the Visually Impaired. ITF (Innovation Technology Fund).
    • Jul 2022 - Mar 2024: NLP-Enhanced STEM Education for Hong Kong Adolescents: A Trial Study on Secondary School Students. Gift Fund from HCL.
    • Mar 2022 - Feb 2023: Knowledge-Enhanced Automatic Essay Grading Research. Gift Fund from Zhongjiaoyunzhi.
    • Jan 2022 - Dec 2024: Social-Transformers: A Deep Pre-training Framework for Social Media Language Understanding. RGC Early Career Scheme (ECS).
    • July 2021 - June 2022: Development of a 3-hour Online Programme on Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics. PolyU Internal Fund under Freshman Seminar for the Online Teaching Development and Educational Research Grant (Co-PI: Dr. Richard Lui). Feel free to explore the AIDA Interactive Playground (only for internal use of PolyU students)!
    • Jan 2022 - Dec 2022: Pre-training Methods for Short Texts. CCF-Baidu Open Fund.
    • Jan 2021 - Dec 2021: Comment-Aware Weakly-Supervised Classification for Social Media Texts. CCF-Tencent Rhino-Bird Young Faculty Open Research Fund.
    • Jan 2021 - Dec 2023: Characterize, Detect, and Neutralize: Context-Aware Computational Methods for Media Bias on Social Platforms. NSFC (Young Scientists Fund).
    • Oct 2019 - Sep 2022: Discourse Parsing for Online Conversations. PolyU Internal Fund.

    Selected Publications

    [Google Scholar]

    Academic Experience

    Research Experience
    • Visiting PhD at Aston University, Birmingham, UK, Jan - Apr, 2016, Supervisor: Prof. Yulan He (Now with King's College London.)
    • Visiting PhD at Northeastern University, Boston, USA, Feb - May, 2017, Supervisor: Prof. Lu Wang (Now with University of Michigan.)
    Organization Committee Member:
    • 2024: ACL (D&I), LREC-COLING (sponsorship), NLPCC (tutorial), EMNLP (Internal Communication)
    • 2023: NLPCC (student workshop), EMNLP (D&I)
    • 2022: AACL (D&I)
    • 2021: ACL-IJCNLP (sponsroship), NLPCC (publicity)
    • 2020: EMNLP (publication/findings), ICONIP (tutorial)
    Programme Committee Member (including area chairs and senior members):
    • 2025: NAACL (Senior Area Chair)
    • 2024: NAACL (area chair), ACL (area chair), LREC-COLING (area chair), NLPCC (area achair), IJCAI
    • 2023: EACL, AAAI (senior member), ICASSP (meta reviewer), ACL (area chair), EMNLP (area chair)
    • 2022: ACL (area chair), ICASSP (meta reviewer), AAAI, EMNLP.
    • 2021: ACL (area chair), IJCAI (senior member), CCL (area chair), AAAI, EACL, NAACL
    • 2020: AAAI, ACL, ICONIP (senior member)
    • 2019: ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, AAAI
    • 2018: ACL and EMNLP (Best reviewer award in EMNLP 2018)
    • 2017: EACL and EMNLP
    • 2016: EMNLP
    • 2015: EMNLP
    Reviewer
    • CL: Sep 2024 - now.
    • TACL: July 2021 - now.
    • ACL Rolling Review (action edtior/area chair).

    Teaching Experience

    Faculty of Engineering Merit Award in Teaching 2023 (Team award as team leader with Dr. Richard Lui)
    • Spring 2025: [COMP1433] Introduction to Data Analytics (co-teaching)
    • Fall 2024: [COMP5423] Natural Language Processing
    • Spring 2024: [COMP1433] Introduction to Data Analytics (co-teaching)
    • Spring 2024: [COMP1433] Introduction to Data Analytics (co-teaching)
    • Fall 2023: [COMP5423] Natural Language Processing
    • Spring 2023: [COMP1433] Introduction to Data Analytics (co-teaching)
    • Spring 2023: [COMP1004] Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics (co-teaching)
    • Fall 2022: [COMP1004] Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics (co-teaching)
    • Spring 2022: [COMP1433] Introduction to Data Analytics
    • Spring 2021: [FH6051] Computational Linguistics (co-teaching)
    • Spring 2021: [COMP5511] Artifical Intelligence Concepts
    • Spring 2021: [COMP1433] Introduction to Data Analytics
    • Spring 2020: [COMP1433] Introduction to Data Analytics
    • Fall 2019: [COMP6701] Advanced Topics in Computer Algorithms (co-teaching)
    • Fall 2019: [COMP4122] Game Design and Development (co-teaching)
    Advisees

    Research Students and Staffs at PolyU
    Alumni at PolyU:
    • Yuji Zhang, PhD student. Aug 2020-Aug 2024. Thesis: Forecast the future : dynamic natural language understanding in evolving social media environments. Co-supervisor: Prof. Maggie Wenjie Li. Publications: [EMNLP 2023] [EMNLP 2021] [ACL-IJCNLP 2021] [EMNLP 2020]. Now a Postdoc at UIUC.
    • Zexin Lu, PhD student. Sep 2019 - Nov 2022. Thesis: Machine-Aided Online User Engagements. Co-supervisor: Chair Prof. Qing Li Publications: [ACL-IJCNLP 2021] [SLT 2021]. Now a Researcher at Huawei.
    • Yixia Li, Master Student and Research Assistant, May 2022 - Jan 2023. Thesis:
    • Yilin Zhang, Research Assistant, Jan 2024 - Jul 2024. Now a Master Student at CMU.
    • Yubo Zhang, Undergraduate Student (under PolyU URIS project), Aug 2020-Aug 2023. Publications: [ACL 2022] [EMNLP 2021]. Now a PhD student at USC.
    • Xiaoxin Lu, Master student and Project Assistant. Jan 2021-June 2022. Dissertation: Doctor Recommendation in Online Health Forums via Expertise Learning. Publication: [ACL 2022]. Now a PhD student at PSU.
    • Yibing Liu, Research Asisstant. Apr 2021 - June 2021. Now a PhD student at CityU. Publication: [ICML 2022].
    • Keyang Ding, Master Student and Research Assistant. Apr 2021 - Aug 2022. Dissertation: Hashtags, Emotions, and Comments: A Large-Scale Dataset to Understand Fine-Grained Social Emotions to Online Topics. Publications: [EMNLP 2020] [ACL-IJCNLP 2021]. Now a PhD student at HIT.
    • Bing Wang, Visiting PhD student from Oxford. Mar 2021 - June 2021. Now an Assistant Professor at PolyU.
    • Junfeng Jiang, Master student. Oct 2019-Mar 2021. Dissertation: Online Medical-consultation Recommendation System with Topic Model. Now a software engineer at Oppo.
    • Hongliang Sun, Master student. Oct 2019-Mar 2021. Dissertation: Domain-Specific Language Model Continue Pretraining for Chinese Weibo. Now a PhD student at HIT.
    • Jiancheng Wen, Research Assistant. Aug 2020-Feb 2021.
    Previous Intern Students at Tencent:
    • Yingyi Zhang, PhD student from NJUST. Oct 2017 - May 2018. Publications: [NAACL 2018] [JASIST 2019]. Now a Lecturer at Soochow University.
    • Jichuan Zeng, PhD student from CUHK. Dec 2017 - Aug 2019. Publications: [EMNLP 2018 ] [TACL 2019] [WWW 2020]. Now a senior research engineer at ByteDance.
    • Yue Wang, PhD student from CUHK. May 2018 - Aug 2019. Publications: [NAACL 2019] [ ACL 2019] [EMNLP 2020]. Now a senior research scientist at Salesforce.
    • Lu Ji, Master student from Fudan. Apr - Aug 2019. Publication: [NAACL 2021]. Tencent Rhino-Bird Elite Training Program. Now an engineer at Pinduoduo.
    • Ming Liao, PhD student from CUHK. May - Sep 2018. Publication: [EMNLP 2019]. Now a Postdoc Fellow at PolyU.
    • Xiaoxue Liu, Master student from Nanjing University. May - Sep 2018. Now an engineer at Tencent.
    Other Student Collaborators