Zhifei Li

ML Systems · Training + Inference Infrastructure

Zhifei Li

Incoming Computer Science PhD at Princeton University, Fall 2026

I'm an incoming PhD student in Computer Science at Princeton University, starting in Fall 2026, where I will be advised by Tri Dao and Ravi Netravali. I previously worked as a Visiting Student Researcher at the Sky Computing Lab at UC Berkeley, advised by Ion Stoica, and also collaborated with Joseph E. Gonzalez and Matei Zaharia. I completed my B.S. in Computer Science (Turing Honors Class) at Renmin University of China.

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Research

Research interests

  • Machine learning systems
  • Training and inference infrastructure
  • Efficient systems for AI workloads
  • Systems support for emerging AI applications

I work broadly on machine learning systems, with interests in efficient infrastructure, training and inference systems, and the design of systems for emerging AI workloads.

Selected work

Publications

All publications

* denotes equal contribution.

Builder lens

Open source

SkyPilot10.5k stars on GitHub

Built the High Availability Controller for SkyServe, later adopted by startups including Hypermode.

  • Top 10 contributor
  • 50+ PRs merged
  • 30k+ LOC

LEANN12.8k stars on GitHub

Led the research-to-production translation of a low-storage vector index for personal devices.

  • 40k+ downloads
  • 600k+ reach
  • research → production

PixelRAG9.5k stars on GitHub

Built the screenshot renderer and the hosted search service behind pixelrag.ai, taking the paper pipeline to a public API and pip package.

  • 10k+ downloads
  • Top contributor
  • live index of 8.28M pages

Writing

Latest insights

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