PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Yixuan Li

Also known as Sharon Li, Sharon Yixuan Li

Yixuan Li, who goes by Sharon Li, is a computer scientist who builds machine-learning systems that recognize the limits of what they know, with out-of-distribution detection at the center of her work. She earned a B.S. at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a Cornell PhD in 2017, worked at Facebook AI and as a Stanford postdoctoral fellow, and joined the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2020. In 2022, NeurIPS gave an Outstanding Paper award to a paper she coauthored on whether out-of-distribution detection is learnable, ICLR gave PiCO an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention, and in 2023 MIT Technology Review named her Innovator of the Year. She received a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship and was appointed a program chair of ICML 2026. She is an associate professor of computer sciences at UW–Madison, where her group works on reliable language-model and agentic systems.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2013–2017

    Shanghai Jiao Tong and Cornell

    She earns a B.S. in Information Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, class of 2013. She completes her PhD at Cornell University in 2017, advised by John E. Hopcroft and working closely with Kilian Q. Weinberger.

  2. 2017–2020

    ODIN, Facebook AI and Stanford

    In 2017, she and her coauthors Shiyu Liang and R. Srikant introduce ODIN, an out-of-distribution image detector that needs no change to a pre-trained neural network; the paper appears at ICLR in 2018. From October 2017 to April 2019 she is a research scientist at Facebook AI, then a postdoctoral research fellow in Stanford's Computer Science department from August 2019 to July 2020, working with Christopher Ré.

  3. 2020

    Energy scores at Wisconsin

    In August 2020, she joins the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison as an assistant professor. Her NeurIPS 2020 paper “Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection,” with Weitang Liu, Xiaoyun Wang and John D. Owens, scores inputs by energy; on a CIFAR-10 pre-trained WideResNet the energy score cuts the average false positive rate by 18.03% against the softmax confidence score.

  4. 2022

    NeurIPS and ICLR paper awards

    ICLR names “PiCO: Contrastive Label Disambiguation for Partial Label Learning,” coauthored with Haobo Wang, Ruixuan Xiao, Lei Feng, Gang Niu, Gang Chen and Junbo Zhao, an Outstanding Paper Honorable Mention in 2022. NeurIPS gives its 2022 Outstanding Paper award to “Is Out-of-distribution Detection Learnable?”, written with Zhen Fang, Jie Lu, Jiahua Dong, Bo Han and Feng Liu, which uses PAC learning theory to study when OOD detection models are learnable.

  5. 2023

    Innovator of the Year

    In 2023, MIT Technology Review names her its Innovator of the Year for her work on out-of-distribution detection, which helps AI models abstain from acting on unfamiliar inputs. She also receives an NSF CAREER Award in 2023.

  6. February 2025

    A Sloan Research Fellowship

    In February 2025, she is named one of 126 Sloan Research Fellows across the United States and Canada, as an assistant professor of computer sciences at UW–Madison.

  7. March 2025

    Program chair for ICML 2026

    In March 2025, she is appointed a program chair of ICML 2026 in Seoul, South Korea. She serves on the organizing committee with Miroslav Dudik, Martin Jaggi and Alekh Agarwal.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at Wisconsin

    She is promoted to associate professor with early tenure in July 2025 and holds that rank in the Department of Computer Sciences and the College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence at UW–Madison. Her group works on reliable LLM and agentic systems, including hallucination detection; HaloScope, a NeurIPS 2024 spotlight paper with Xuefeng Du and Chaowei Xiao, belongs to this line.

Career

  1. Since 2020University of Wisconsin–MadisonAssistant professor, Associate professor
  2. 2019–2020Stanford UniversityPostdoctoral research fellow
  3. 2017–2019MetaResearch scientist

Education

  1. 2017Cornell UniversityPhD
  2. 2013Shanghai Jiao Tong UniversityB.S. in Information Engineering

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 Yixuan 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 Yixuan 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. 20% of people at companies who shape AI also hold a university role, led by Google and Stanford UniversityIncludes Stanford University. We estimate that 539 of the 6,766 people with a known current organization (8%) hold both a university role and a company role, including 20% of people at companies and 13% of people at universities.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes University of Wisconsin–Madison. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

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

  1. SJTU Alumna Sharon Yixuan Li Awarded the 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship en.sjtu.edu.cn. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Sharon Li - UW Madison Computer Sciences pages.cs.wisc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Enhancing The Reliability of Out-of-distribution Image Detection in Neural Networks arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Professional Experiences pages.cs.wisc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Energy-based Out-of-distribution Detection arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Announcing the ICLR 2022 Outstanding Paper Award Recipients blog.iclr.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Announcing the NeurIPS 2022 Awards blog.neurips.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Introducing our TR35 innovators technologyreview.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. UW-Madison CS professor Sharon Li named 2023 Innovator of the Year cs.wisc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  10. UW–Madison researchers win prestigious Sloan fellowships news.wisc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  11. ICML 2026 Committees icml.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  12. Sharon Li – Publications pages.cs.wisc.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.