About Me

I’m a second-year Ph.D. candidate 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. My current research interests focus on advancing the reasoning and agentic capabilities of foundation models.

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.

Selected Papers

(* denotes equal contribution)

• 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
  Manuscript 2025
  [PDF] [Code] [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]
  

• Latent Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems
  Jiaru Zou*, Xiyuan Yang*, Ruizhong Qiu, Gaotang Li, Katherine Tieu, Pan Lu, Ke Shen, Hanghang Tong, Yejin Choi, Jingrui He, James Zou, Mengdi Wang, Ling Yang
  Manuscript 2025
  [PDF] [Code] [Tweet]
  

• Efficient Inference Scaling for Safety Assurance
  Ruizhong Qiu*, Gaotang Li*, Ting-Wei Li*, Tianxin Wei, Jingrui He, Hanghang Tong
  NeurIPS Workshop on Vision–Language Model Real-World Deployment, 2025
  [PDF] [Code] [Project Page] [Tweet]