Zehui Li

PhD, Imperial College London

zl6222@ic.ac.uk

Zehui is a PhD student in Machine Learning at Imperial College London, supervised by Dr. Yiren Zhao and Dr. Guy-Bart Stan. His research spans diffusion and autoregressive generative models, with a focus on long-context sequence modeling on discrete data.

He has conducted research internships at Microsoft Research Asia (Rising Star Research Internship; Outstanding Award) and at the Vector Institute & University of Toronto (Bo Wang’s lab). Zehui has authored publications at NeurIPS (2024, 2025), ICLR (2025), and an ICML 2023 workshop Best Paper Award.

Interests

Ai4Science
Diffusion Model & Autoregressive Model
Agentic Systems
Machine Learning with Graphs
Structured Probabilistic Model

Academia

Imperial College London

2023 - present

Ph.D. Bioinformatics and Machine Learning

supervised by Prof. Guy-Bart Stan and Dr. Aaron Zhao

University of Cambridge

2019 - 2020

MPhil Advanced Computer Science

graduated with Distinction, supervised by Prof. Pietro Lio’ and Prof. Simone Teufel

University of Nottingham

2015 - 2019

B.Sc. Computer Science , Minor: Statistics

Graduate with First Class Honours

publications and preprints

Publications and Preprints

Joint Adaptation of Uni-modal Foundation Models for Multi-modal Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis, 2026, ICLR 2026

Wentao Gu , Yuquan Li , Xinyang Jiang , Zilong Wang , Dongsheng Li , Zehui Li , Zijian Dong , Cairong Zhao

Omni-DNA: A Genomic Model Supporting Sequence Understanding, Long-context, and Textual Annotation, 2025, NeurIPS 2025

Zehui Li , Vallijah Subasri , Yifei Shen , Dongsheng Li , Wentao Gu , Guy-Bart Stan , Yiren Zhao , Caihua Shan

Absorb&Escape: Overcoming Single Model Limitations in Generating Genomic Sequences, 2024, NeurIPS 2024

Zehui Li , Yuhao Ni , Guoxuan Xia , William Beardall , Akashaditya Das , Guy-Bart Stan , Yiren Zhao

GV-Rep: A Large-Scale Dataset for Genetic Variant Representation Learning, 2024, NeurIPS 2024

Zehui Li , Vallijah Subasri , Guy-Bart Stan , Yiren Zhao , Bo Wang

Enhancing Node Representations for Complex Networks with Topological Augmentation, 2024, ECAI 2024 (Oral)

Xiangyu Zhao , Zehui Li , Mingzhu Shen , Guy-Bart Stan , Pietro Lio , Yiren Zhao

Genomic Interpreter: A Hierarchical Genomic Deep Neural Network with 1D Swin Transformer, 2023, ICML 2023 Workshop on Computational Biology (Best Paper Award; Contributed Talk)

Zehui Li , Akashaditya Das , William A V Beardall , Yiren Zhao , Guy-Bart Stan

code pdf

Latent Diffusion Model for DNA Sequence Generation, 2023, NeurIPS 2023 Workshop on AI for Science

Zehui Li , Yuhao Ni , Tim August B. Huygelen , Akashaditya Das , Guoxuan Xia , Guy-Bart Stan , Yiren Zhao

Projects

Researh project related to machine learning and bioinformatics

Optimising representation learning of heterogeneous cancer data

code pdf

An exploration on the optimization routines of SVI for GPs

code pdf

Adversarial Attack on State-of-the-art Question-Answering Systems

code pdf

Other Intersting Projects:

/[consistency theorem for clustering] /[self-driving car simulator using reinforcement learning] /[smoother robot control with the variants of a* planning algorithm]