PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Meng Li

Also known as 李萌

Meng Li is an assistant professor at Peking University who develops efficient and privacy-preserving AI systems through algorithm–hardware co-design. After a bachelor's degree in microelectronics at Peking University, Li earned a PhD in computer engineering at the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, and the dissertation won the 2018 EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award. From 2018 to 2022 they were a staff research scientist and tech lead for on-device AI at Meta Reality Labs, and in 2021 they co-authored the AttentiveNAS architecture-search method presented at CVPR 2021. They joined Peking University in July 2022, and the team they lead published CoPriv at NeurIPS 2023, which cut the communication cost of private inference by nearly four times. They are a tenure-track assistant professor at the university's Institute for Artificial Intelligence and School of Integrated Circuits.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2009–2018

    Degrees from Peking and UT Austin

    They earn a bachelor's degree in microelectronics from Peking University in 2013, supervised by Ru Huang and Runsheng Wang. A PhD in computer engineering follows at the University of Texas at Austin in August 2018, supervised by David Z. Pan.

  2. 2017–2018

    Best papers and an EDAA award

    Best paper awards come at HOST in 2017 and at GLSVLSI in 2018. The dissertation, A Synergistic Framework for Hardware IP Privacy and Integrity Protection, receives the 2018 European Design and Automation Association Outstanding Dissertation Award.

  3. 2018–2022

    Staff scientist at Meta Reality Labs

    They join Meta in September 2018 as a research scientist and progress to senior and then staff research scientist. As tech lead for on-device AI at Meta Reality Labs, they work on efficient neural networks and hardware co-design for AR glasses until July 2022.

  4. 2021

    AttentiveNAS at CVPR

    With Dilin Wang, Chengyue Gong and Vikas Chandra, they co-author AttentiveNAS, a sampling strategy for two-stage neural architecture search. The paper appears at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, and its models reach 77.3% to 80.7% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet.

  5. July 2022

    Assistant professor at Peking University

    In July 2022 they become a tenure-track assistant professor at Peking University, with a dual appointment at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the School of Integrated Circuits. The research areas are efficient and secure multimodal AI acceleration algorithms and systems.

  6. 2023–2024

    CoPriv and HG-PIPE

    CoPriv, from a team led by Li, jointly optimizes the neural network and the private inference protocol, cuts communication by nearly four times and appears at NeurIPS 2023. They co-author HG-PIPE, a pipelined FPGA accelerator for vision transformers accepted at ICCAD 2024, which reaches 7118 images per second on a VCK190 FPGA.

  7. 2024

    A CCF early-career award

    The China Computer Federation gives them its Integrated Circuits Early Career Award in July 2024.

  8. As of October 2026

    Efficient and private AI group

    As of October 2026, they are a tenure-track assistant professor at Peking University's Institute for Artificial Intelligence and School of Integrated Circuits. The lab develops efficient and privacy-preserving AI systems through algorithm–hardware co-design, with applications in large language models, embodied AI and multimodal intelligence.

Career

  1. Since 2022Peking UniversityTenure-track Assistant Professor
  2. 2018–2022MetaStaff Research Scientist; Tech Lead for On-Device AI

Education

  1. 2018University of Texas at AustinPhD
  2. 2013Peking UniversityBachelor's degree

From the biography.

  1. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Meng Li. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  2. 23% of people shaping AI who left a university for a company later returned to a universityIncludes Meng Li. We estimate that 468 of the 2,011 people shaping AI who left a university for a company (23%) later returned to a university after a median of 5 years, and 163 of 829 (20%) made the reverse round trip.
  3. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Peking University. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Peking University. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Meng Li yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Meng Li-北京大学人工智能研究院 ai.pku.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Meng Li's Homepage mengli.me. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Texas ECE Alumnus Meng Li Named Recipient of EDAA Outstanding Dissertation Award ece.utexas.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. [2011.09011] AttentiveNAS: Improving Neural Architecture Search via Attentive Sampling arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Li，Meng-School Of Integrated Circuits ic.pku.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. [NeurIPS 2023] "New Paradigm Towards Efficient Private Inference": Collaborative Optimization of Neural Network Architecture and Private Inference Protocol-北京大学人工智能研究院 ai.pku.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. [2407.17879] HG-PIPE: Vision Transformer Acceleration with Hybrid-Grained Pipeline arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.