Yifei Li
李一飞 | CS PhD Student
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
I am a final-year PhD student at MIT CSAIL in the Computational Design and Fabrication Group, advised by Prof. Wojciech Matusik. I received my bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, where I was fortunate enough to be advised by Prof. Jessica Hodgins.
My research develops computational foundations for Physical AI by combining physics-based simulation, optimization, and learning to help AI systems reason about, predict, and act on physical dynamics.
I was selected as a Rising Stars in EECS, Rising Stars in Computer Graphics, and received the MIT Stata Family Presidential Fellowship. I have spent summers interning at NVIDIA, Boston Dynamics AI Institute, Meta Reality Labs, Meta FAIR as a research intern, Google as a SWE intern and Activision Blizzard working on Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 game engine development.
Outside of research, I enjoy ballet, piano, photography and skiing. I grew up dancing ballet and am a member of the Harvard Ballet Company. I have two Maine Coon cats, 🐈 Balanchine & 🐈⬛ Yihui .
- (Differentiable) Physics-Based Simulation and Modeling
- Learning for Physical AI and Digital Worlds
- Optimization and Adaptation for Physical AI
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2020 - Present
Ph.D. in EECS (Expected 2026), M.S. in EECS (2022)
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Carnegie Mellon University 2016 - 2020
B.S. in Computer Science , minor in Machine Learning
Organizer
- Posters Juror: SIGGRAPH 2026
- Organizing: Vision Meets Physics, CVPR 2025
- Web Chair: SCF 2025
Reviewer
Graphics
- SIGGRAPH (Asia)
- Transactions on Graphics
- Eurographics
- Computer Graphics Forum
- Pacific Graphics
Vision
- CVPR
- ICCV
- ECCV
AI
- NeurIPS
- ICLR
- ICML
- AAAI
- [2025/9] Selected as Rising Stars in EECS.
- [2024/9] NeuralFluid is accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
- [2024/5] Selected as WiGRAPH Rising Stars in Computer Graphics. See you in Denver at SIGGRAPH !
- [2024/2] DiffAvatar is accepted to CVPR 2024 .
- [2023/3] Paper on Animated Drawings is accepted by TOG and will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2023.
- [2022/8] AnisotropicStokes is accepted to SIGGRAPH Asia 2022 (Journal Track). Covered by MIT News and spotlighted on the MIT homepage.
- [2022/3] DiffCloth is accepted by Transactions on Graphics. JoinABLe is accepted by CVPR 2022.
Experience
Media Coverage
My Cats
Yihui & Balanchine
Balanchine is named after George Balanchine and Yihui is a variation of my name (“hui,” meaning gray).
Contact
- liyifei@csail.mit.edu
- MIT CSAIL, Cambridge, MA 02139