About Me

I’m a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, working under the supervision of Hanghang Tong. Prior to this, I earned my bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan.

I study how to scale large language models to advance their reasoning and agentic capabilities. My research interests lie broadly in language modeling and post-training, with a current focus on model architectures.

Email: gaotang3 [at] illinois [dot] edu

You can call me as Oliver. If you would like to chat with me about anything (e.g. research, internship opportunities, grad school application, mentorship etc.), feel free to fill out this form. Students from underrepresented groups are especially encouraged to reach out.

Selected Papers

(* denotes equal contribution)

• RubricEM: Meta-RL with Rubric-guided Policy Decomposition beyond Verifiable Rewards
  Gaotang Li, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Zifeng Wang, Jun Yan, Yanfei Chen, Chun-Liang Li, Long T. Le, Rujun Han, George Lee, Hanghang Tong, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
  Manuscript 2026
  [PDF] [Tweet]
  

• Beyond Log Likelihood: Probability-Based Objectives for Supervised Fine-Tuning across the Model Capability Continuum
  Gaotang Li*, Ruizhong Qiu*, Xiusi Chen*, Heng Ji, Hanghang Tong
  ICML 2026 (spotlight)
  [PDF] [Code] [HuggingFace] [Project Page] [Tweet]
  

• RM-R1: Reward Modeling as Reasoning
  Xiusi Chen*, Gaotang Li*, Ziqi Wang*, Bowen Jin, Cheng Qian, Yu Wang, Hongru Wang, Yu Zhang, Denghui Zhang, Tong Zhang, Hanghang Tong, Heng Ji
  ICLR 2026
  [PDF] [Code] [HuggingFace] [Project Page] [Tweet]
  

• Taming Knowledge Conflicts in Language Models
  Gaotang Li, Yuzhong Chen, Hanghang Tong
  ICML 2025 (spotlight)
  [PDF] [Code] [HuggingFace] [Project Page] [Tweet]