Muheng Li

Muheng Li

University of Toronto

Hi! I am a second-year Ph.D. student in Statistics at the University of Toronto. I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Wenlong Mou and Prof. Xin Bing. I am also affiliated with the Vector Institute. Prior to my Ph.D. study, I received my B.S. in Statistics from Nanjing University in 2024.

My research focuses on designing statistically grounded machine learning algorithms that are both efficient and provably reliable, bridging theory and practice through optimization and statistical modeling. I currently work on LLM post-training and inference-time methods under limited feedback.

I am open to research internship opportunities related to LLM post-training.

Email: muheng [DOT] li [AT] mail [DOT] utoronto [DOT] ca

News

  • May 2026, New preprint on post-training optimization from a test-time scaling law perspective.
  • May 2026, one paper accepted by KDD 2026 D&B Track.
  • Feb 2026, New preprint on test-time scaling laws and budget-efficient inference-time search.
  • Feb 2025, one paper accepted by TMLR.

Publications

  • What should post-training optimize? A test-time scaling law perspective
    Under review, 2026
    Muheng Li, Jian Qian, Wenlong Mou
    Paper

  • Predicting and Improving Test-time Scaling Laws via Reward Tail-guided Search
    Under review, 2026
    Muheng Li, Jian Qian, Wenlong Mou
    Paper · Code

  • Solving Urban Network Security Games: Learning Platform, Benchmark, and Challenge for AI Research
    ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD 2026, D&B Track)
    Shuxin Zhuang, Shuxin Li, Tianji Yang, Muheng Li, Xianjie Shi, Bo An, Youzhi Zhang
    Paper

  • Reheated Gradient-based Discrete Sampling for Combinatorial Optimization
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2025
    Muheng Li, Ruqi Zhang
    Paper· Code

Services

  • Conference Reviewer: UAI (2024, 2025); ICML (2025, 2026; Silver Reviewer in 2026); ICLR (2025)

Teaching

  • STA314H1F: Statistical Methods for Machine Learning I (Fall 2025), Teaching Assistant, University of Toronto.
  • STA255: Statistical Theory (Winter 2025), Teaching Assistant, University of Toronto.