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Li "Harry" Zhang  张力


About Me

I am an assistant professor at Drexel University focusing on Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence. I'm interested in planning and reasoning using Large Language Models. I earned my PhD (thesis) from the University of Pennsylvania, having the honor to be mentored by Prof. Chris Callison-Burch, with a thesis committee chaired by Prof. Dan Roth. I earned my BS from the University of Michigan in 2018, mentored by Prof. Rada Mihalcea and Prof. Dragomir Radev.

I am hiring either paid and unpaid, either remote or in-person research assistants or interns with the goal of conversion to a PhD student. Those interested should fill out this form. I cannot respond to emails on this matter.

CV

Harry.Zhang@drexel.edu


Affiliations

Drexel Universitydrexel logo
Assistant Professor;
Dec 2024 to Present

University of Pennsylvaniaupenn logo
Ph.D.; Aug 2019 to Aug 2024

Allen Institute for Artifical IntelligenceAI2
Research Intern;
April 2023 to Dec 2023

IBM ResearchIBM Research
Research Intern; May 2021 to Aug 2021,
April 2019 to June 2019

University of Michiganumich logo
B.S.E.; Aug 2015 to Dec 2018

Goldman SachsGoldman Sachs
Summer Analyst;
May 2017 to Aug 2017

Shenzhen Middle SchoolSMS logo
High School Diploma;
Sept 2012 to Jun 2015

Mentorship and Teaching

HazLab at Drexel
Cassie Huang (PhD student)
Krystal Gong (intern)
Prabhu Prakash Kagitha (MS student)
Rikhil Amonkar (UG student)
Past Mentees at Penn
Tianyi Zhang
Hainiu Xu, King's College London
Zhaoyi Hou, University of Pittsburg
Young-Min Cho, University of Pennsylvania
Teaching

Instructor: CS T780-001: Applied NLP (Spring 2025 at Drexel)

TA: CIS 530: Computational Linguistics (Winter, Fall 2020 at Penn)

TA: EECS 595: Natural Language Processing (Fall 2018 at Michigan)

TA: EECS 280: Programming and Introductory Data Structures (Winter, Fall 2016 at Michigan)


Service

I have reviewed more than 50 papers of and chaired for many NLP conferences and workshops.



Research

Primary Work: Executable and Trustworthy Planning with LLMs

While large language models (LLM) can provide decent instructions, they are far from able to come up an executable and trustworthy plan for a particular user or agent, grounding to their specific situation and needs. To address this, I advocate for the neurosymbolic methodology of using LLM as a code generator to create a formal representation of the planning environment. In conjunction with tools in classical AI planning, a plan can be found deterministically and faithfully.


My primary efforts lie in using LLMs to generate formal language, such as PDDL that describes the planning environment.

[30] On the Limit of Language Models as Planning Formalizers; Cassie Huang^Mentored student and Li Zhang; in arxiv.Paper BibTeX Repo

[29] PDDLEGO: Iterative Planning in Textual Environments; Li Zhang, Peter Jansen, Peter Clark, Chris Callison-Burch and Niket Tandon; in *SEM 2024.Paper BibTeX Repo

[28] PROC2PDDL: Open-Domain Planning Representations from Texts; Tianyi Zhang*Equal contribution^Mentored student, Li Zhang*Equal contribution, Zhaoyi Hou^Mentored student, Ziyu Wang^Mentored student, Yuling Gu, Peter Clark, Chris Callison-Burch and Niket Tandon; in ACL 2024 2st Workshop on Natural Language Reasoning and Structured Explanations.Paper BibTeX Repo

[20] Faithful Chain of Thought Reasoning; Qing Lyu*Equal contribution, Shreya Havaldar*Equal contribution, Adam Stein*Equal contribution, Li Zhang, Delip Rao, Eric Wong, Marianna Apidianaki and Chris Callison-Burch; in IJCNLP-AACL 2023.Paper BibTeX Repo


Activities


Music

I am a drummer, producer and video content creator. I run a video channel with over 50,000 subscribers on Bilibili and YouTube, primarily making cover songs from video game and anime soundtracks, in a variety of styles ranging from metal to jazz. I am proudly sponsored by Vater, Tama, Mackie, Alesis, NUX, Xvive and have collaborated with manufacturers of major video games such as Genshin Impact and Azur Lane.
bilibili        

My videos are primarily either collaboration-work music videos or solo-work drum covers.

 

My new album, Megidalon, a collection of reimagined Persona soundracks, is available for streaming on all platforms! My two previous albums Dazzling Tales (reimagined Genshin Impact soundtracks) and A Doll's Lament (reimagined NieR soundtracks) are also available for listening on all major streaming platforms.

Megidalon   Dazzling Tales   A Doll's Lament


I also engage in research of AI music generation, having published a paper on automatic drum composition in an AAAI 2023 workshop.

[18] Language Models are Drummers: Drum Composition with Natural Language Pre-Training; Li Zhang and Chris Callison-Burch; in AAAI 2023 Workshop on Creative AI Across Modalities.Paper Repo BibTeX