Pengfei Li

Final-year Ph.D. candidate, University of California, Riverside

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Winston Chung Hall 459

Riverside, US 92507

pli081@ucr.edu, pli2@caltech.edu

I am Pengfei Li, a final-year CS Ph.D. candidate in University of California, Riverside, under the supervision of Prof. Shaolei Ren. Prior to that, I obtained a M.S.E degree in Robotics from Johns Hopkins University and a B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University. Since the summer of 2022, I has been working closely with Adam Wierman at Caltech, focusing on trustworthy learning augmented online optimization. In the summer 2023, I was fortunate to intern at Nokia Bell Labs mentored by Dr Matthew Andrews, focusing on autonomous ware-house operations with digital twins.

Research Highlights

My overarching research goal is to develop trustworthy, sustainable and equitable machine learning systems that enhance the efficiency of real-world systems and address critical societal and environmental challenges.

  • Trustworthy Online Algorithms: Addressing fundamental theoretical and algorithmic challenges in online algorithms, towards strict robustness, safety and fairness guarantees (NeurIPS’23a, NeurIPS’23b, ICML’23).
  • Sustainable AI: Modeling and measuring the resource consumption and environmental footprint during the deployment of AI system, mitigating these negative impacts with principled approaches (SIGMETRICS’22, eEnergy’24a, eEnergy’24b, SIGMETRICS’25, CACM’25).
  • Environmental and Social Fairness: Developing algorithmic solutions to mitigate the environmental and social inequities (ICML’24, HotEthics’24).

news

Feb 20, 2025 I am honored to receive the Dissertation Completion Fellowship Award (DCFA) from the Graduate Program in Computer Science ✨✨✨ This award will support my final two quarters at UC Riverside.
Feb 01, 2025 Join us for an exciting workshop on learning-augmented algorithms at SIGMETRICS 2025, where we’ll bring together leading experts to discuss provable guarantees, real-world applications, and the future of algorithms enhanced by ML predictions.
Jan 01, 2025 AI’s silent toll on public health is bigger than you think. Our new findings expose the overlooked health toll of AI’s environmental footprint, urging action for responsible, health-informed AI development.

selected publications

  1. SIGMETRICS
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    Expert-Calibrated Learning for Online Optimization with Switching Costs
    Pengfei Li*Jianyi Yang*, and Shaolei Ren
    Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems, 2022
  2. CACM
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    Making AI Less “Thirsty”: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models
    Pengfei LiJianyi Yang, Mohammad A. Islam, and 1 more author
    arXiv 2304.03271, 2023
  3. ICML
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    Learning for edge-weighted online bipartite matching with robustness guarantees
    Pengfei LiJianyi Yang, and Shaolei Ren
    In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, 2023
  4. NeurIPS
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    Robust learning for smoothed online convex optimization with feedback delay
    Pengfei LiJianyi YangAdam Wierman, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2023