Hello! My name is Gene Li.

I obtained my Ph.D. from the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, a philanthropically endowed CS research institution. I was fortunate to be advised by Nathan Srebro.

Previously, I graduated with a BSE from the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at Princeton University. There, I had the pleasure of working with Yuxin Chen and Emmanuel Abbe.

Research Interests. During my Ph.D., I worked on theoretical machine learning and decision making. I primarily thought about function approximation for reinforcement learning in large state spaces, with the goal of characterizing the fundamental limits for these problems and understanding new algorithmic paradigms. For more details, you can read my Ph.D. thesis.

If you want to get in touch, you can reach me at: [firstname] at ttic dot edu.

You can find my (perpetually outdated) CV here.

Publications [Google Scholar]

α: denotes alphabetical author order, as is customary in theoretical computer science.

Teaching

Misc

Some notes on learning theory. These notes were mostly for my own personal reference as I was learning the subject, but others may find them useful. Any mistakes are my own.

My sister Greta Li is an aspiring physicist.

I am a long-time (often suffering) fan of the Tennessee Titans.

My favorite painting.

~ Website last updated June 2025. ~