Hi! I am a PhD candidate at MIT CSAIL, affiliated with the language & intelligence (LINGO) lab @ MIT. My advisor is Jacob Andreas. I have very broad interests within natural language processing, but some high-level themes of recent work include:

• Probing for and improving representations of world states in language models
• Improving factuality and coherence of language models
• Using language models to understand user preferences

I am funded by an NDSEG Fellowship and Clare Boothe Luce Graduate Fellowship [Press]. Previously, I spent a year at Facebook AI Applied Research, and before that, I obtained my B.S. in Computer Science at the University of Washington, where I worked with Luke Zettlemoyer. You can view more in my CV.

I am looking for a UROP to start in Fall semester 2024. Please email me and fill out this form if you are a MIT undergraduate who is interested in UROPing with me!

Representative Papers

• Bayesian Preference Elicitation with Language Models
  Kunal Handa, Yarin Gal, Ellie Pavlick, Noah Goodman, Jacob Andreas, Alex Tamkin, Belinda Z. Li
  ArXiv Preprint

• Eliciting Human Preferences with Language Models
  Belinda Z. Li, Alex Tamkin, Noah Goodman, Jacob Andreas
  ArXiv Preprint

• Measuring and Manipulating Knowledge Representations in Language Models
  Evan Hernandez, Belinda Z. Li, Jacob Andreas
  ArXiv Preprint

• Implicit Representations of Meaning in Neural Language Models
  Belinda Z. Li, Maxwell Nye, Jacob Andreas
  ACL, 2021.

# All Papers This list is updated very intermittently. For the latest, up-to-date list, please check my [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=700fyvEAAAAJ&hl=en). * [**Preference-Conditioned Language-Guided Abstraction**](https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610977.3634930) \\ Andi Peng, Andreea Bobu, Belinda Z Li, Theodore R Sumers, Ilia Sucholutsky, Nishanth Kumar, Thomas L Griffiths, Julie A Shah \\ *HRI*, 2024 * [**Bayesian Preference Elicitation with Language Models**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.05534) \\ Kunal Handa, Yarin Gal, Ellie Pavlick, Noah Goodman, Jacob Andreas, Alex Tamkin\*, Belinda Z. Li\* \\ *ArXiv Preprint* \* = Equal contribution * [**Learning with language-guided state abstractions**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18759) \\ Andi Peng, Ilia Sucholutsky\*, Belinda Z Li\*, Theodore R Sumers, Thomas L Griffiths, Jacob Andreas, Julie A Shah \\ *ICLR*, 2024 \* = Equal contribution * [**Eliciting Human Preferences with Language Models**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11589) \\ Belinda Z. Li\*, Alex Tamkin\*, Noah Goodman, Jacob Andreas \\ *ArXiv Preprint* \* = Equal contribution * [**Measuring and Manipulating Knowledge Representations in Language Models**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00740) \\ Evan Hernandez, Belinda Z. Li, Jacob Andreas \\ *ArXiv Preprint* * [**LaMPP: Language Models as Probabilistic Priors for Perception and Action**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.02801) \\ Belinda Z. Li, William Chen, Pratyusha Sharma, Jacob Andreas \\ *ArXiv Preprint* * [**Toward Interactive Dictation**](https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.854/) \\ Belinda Z Li, Jason Eisner, Adam Pauls, Sam Thomson \\ *ACL*, 2023 * [**Language Modeling with Latent Situations**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10012) \\ Belinda Z. Li, Maxwell Nye, Jacob Andreas \\ *ACL Findings*, 2023 * [**Quantifying Adaptability in Pre-trained Language Models with 500 Tasks**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2112.03204) \\ Belinda Z. Li, Jane Yu, Madian Khabsa, Luke Zettlemoyer, Alon Halevy, Jacob Andreas \\ *NAACL*, 2022 * [**Implicit Representations of Meaning in Neural Language Models**](https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.143/) \\ Belinda Z. Li, Maxwell Nye, Jacob Andreas \\ *ACL*, 2021. * [**On Unifying Misinformation Detection**](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2021.naacl-main.432/) \\ Nayeon Lee, Belinda Z. Li, Sinong Wang, Pascale Fung, Hao Ma, Wen-tau Yih, and Madian Khabsa \\ *NAACL*, 2021 * [**On the Influence of Masking Policies in Intermediate Pre-training**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.08840) \\ Qinyuan Ye, Belinda Z. Li, Sinong Wang, Benjamin Bolte, Hao Ma, Wen-tau Yih, Xiang Ren, and Madian Khabsa \\ *EMNLP*, 2021 * [**Studying Strategically: Learning to Mask for Closed-book QA**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.15856) \\ Qinyuan Ye, Belinda Z. Li, Sinong Wang, Benjamin Bolte, Hao Ma, Wen-tau Yih, Xiang Ren, and Madian Khabsa \\ *ArXiv Preprint* * [**Efficient One-Pass End-to-End Entity Linking for Questions**](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.emnlp-main.522/) \\ Belinda Z. Li, Sewon Min, Srinivasan Iyer, Yashar Mehdad, and Wen-tau Yih \\ *EMNLP*, 2020 * [**Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity**](https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.04768) \\ Sinong Wang, Belinda Z. Li, Madian Khabsa, Han Fang, and Hao Ma \\ *ArXiv Preprint* * [**Language Models as Fact Checkers?**](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.fever-1.5/) \\ Nayeon Lee, Belinda Z. Li, Sinong Wang, Wen-tau Yih, Hao Ma, and Madian Khabsa \\ *FEVER (Fact Extraction and VERification) Workshop @ ACL*, 2020 * [**Active Learning for Coreference Resolution using Discrete Annotation**](https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-main.738/) \\ Belinda Z. Li, Gabriel Stanovsky, and Luke Zettlemoyer \\ *ACL*, 2020

Misc

Outside of work…

• I organize with the MIT Graduate Student Union. We’re fighting for a contract with decent wages, benefits, real recourse, equity for international workers, and more. Please join us!
• I also dance ballet and have recently started (indoor) bouldering.

Fun facts:

• Noam Chomsky is my great(x3)-grand-advisor. Belinda Li → Jacob Andreas → Dan Klein → Chris Manning → Joan Bresnan → Noam Chomsky
• Under very generous definitions, my Erdős–Bacon number is 7. I eagerly welcome any collaborators – academic or entertainment – willing to lower that number. If we loosen the definition of “Bacon number” to allow for video appearances, my Bacon number is 3 through appearing in a video with Bernie Sanders, who happens to have a Bacon number of 2. My Erdős number is 4 through several different paths. However, if we take the standard definition (for those of you Bacon number purists out there), my Bacon number is unfortunately undefined as I have not appeared in a movie.