About

Hello! I am a 2nd-year undergraduate studying Computer Science at the University of Washington. My current work studies how language models learn, represent, and expose structure through tokenization, decoding, and representation geometry. My earlier published work was in computational photography, which was my first route into computer vision & applied AI.

In my free time I like to talk about tokenizers, play the piano, and sometimes question my sanity—although I will admit these are not mutually exclusive activities.

Language Models Tokenization Inference-time algorithms Reinforcement Learning Computer Vision

News

2026

Language Models Detokenize, But Only for Themselves was selected for an oral presentation at AACL-IJCNLP 2026!

Learning Spectrum-Matched Gap Sequences for Shellsort was accepted to NeurIPS 2026 as a poster!

Language Models Detokenize, But Only for Themselves was accepted to AACL-IJCNLP 2026.

I am honored to have received the Kyril Faenov Endowed Scholarship in Computer Science & Engineering!

Publications

Learning Spectrum-Matched Gap Sequences for Shellsort

Qingyun Li, Yunjin Li, Yunqi Li, and Ruoyun Li

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2026 Main track New

Language Models Detokenize, But Only for Themselves

Qingyun Li, Ruoyun Li

AACL-IJCNLP 2026 OralMain track

Education

2025-present

University of Washington, Seattle

Computer Science, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering.

2023-2025

Everett Community College

Associate of Arts and Sciences in Mathematics, President's List, 4.0 GPA.

2024-2025

High School

Graduated in ninth grade with a 4.0 GPA.

Random Stuff

2026

Kyril Faenov Endowed Scholarship in Computer Science & Engineering

Awarded July 2026.

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Service

Served as a reviewer for AAAI 2027 and ICLR 2027.

2025

Desmos Art Contest 2024 Winner

Selected in February 2025 as one of 20 graphs from more than 10,000 submissions.

2023

Perfect ACT score of 36

Earned at age 11 in September 2023 (youngest in history).

2021-2023

USACO Gold Division

Reached Silver in Dec 2021 with a perfect score at age 10, Reached Gold in Feb 2023 at 11.

Patents