Yuxuan (Effie) Li

I am a final year PhD student in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, advised by Jay McClelland. I am broadly interested in machine and human intelligence.

My PhD research investigates a learning theory of task decomposition and subgoal choices in neural networks (transformers) and humans, using behavior and representation analysis to understand how structured tasks and data distributions shape emergent cognitive abilities.

I am currently a research intern at Meta. I have previously interned at AI2 on the PRIOR team, working with Luca Weihs. Prior to Stanford, I double-majored in Computer Science and Psychology at Trinity College (Connecticut), and worked on building neural decoders of human episodic memory at UPenn.

Github  | CV  | Google Scholar  | Linkedin