Puheng Li (李朴恒)

Puheng Li (李朴恒)

Ph.D. Student

Stanford

Welcome!

I'm a third-year PhD student in the Department of Statistics at Stanford University, where I'm fortunate to be advised by Prof. Emmanuel Candès and Prof. Renyuan Xu. My research interest lies broadly in leveraging statistical methods to guide modern machine learning and make them more interpretable, reliable, efficient and accurate with statistical guarantees. Previously, I received my bachelor's degree in statistics from School of Mathematical Sciences at Peking University. I had the pleasure of working with Prof. Lei Wu, Prof. Weijie Su, Prof. Linjun Zhang, and Prof. James Zou during my undergraduate study. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in my research!

Contact
puhengli AT stanford DOT edu
Education
  • Ph.D. in Statistics, 2023-

    Department of Statistics, Stanford University

  • B.S. in Statistics, 2023

    School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University

  • High School Diploma (Mathematics), 2019

    Shanghai High School

(*: Equal contribution.)

Publications

Preprint

Talks

Teaching

Teaching Assistant, Stanford University
  • STATS 202 - Statistical Learning and Data Science (2025-2026 Winter)
  • STATS 117 - Introduction to Probability Theory (2025-2026 Autumn)
  • STATS 208 - Resampling Methods: Bootstrap, Cross Validation and Beyond (2024-2025 Spring)
  • STATS 207/307 - Time Series Analysis (2024-2025 Autumn)
  • STATS 191 - Introduction to Applied Statistics (2023-2024 Summer)
  • STATS 207/307 - Introduction to Time Series Analysis (2023-2024 Spring)
  • STATS 100 - Mathematics of Sports (2023-2024 Winter)
  • Experience & Service

    Applied Scientist Intern, Amazon (Jun. 2025 - Sep. 2025)
  • Worked on LLMs for fraud detection and prevention.


  • Research Scientist Intern, Machine Learning Group, Microsoft Research Asia (Mar. 2023 - Jun. 2023)
  • Worked on estimating the generalization error of score based diffusion models, under the supervision of Dr. Zhong Li, Dr. Huishuai Zhang, and Dr. Jiang Bian.


  • Reviewer: ICLR 2025, NeurIPS 2025 (Main Conference + GenAI in Finance Workshop), CVPR 2026

    Honors & Awards

  • 2025 Finalist, Cubist PhD Fellowship
  • 2023 Stars of Tomorrow, Microsoft Research Asia
  • 2023 Excellent Graduate (PKU & Beijing)
  • 2022 Leo Koguan Scholarship
  • 2022, 2021, 2020 Merit Student of Peking University
  • 2021 Peking University Talent Pool Scholarship
  • 2020 Yizheng Alumni Scholarship
  • 2018 Gold Medal at the 34th Chinese Mathematical Olympiad (CMO)
  • 2017 Silver Medal at the 33rd Chinese Mathematical Olympiad (CMO)
  • Miscellaneous

    I love singing, especially solo and a cappella. I was honored one of the Top 10 Singers at Peking University.
    Find some of my performances on my Bilibili!

    I enjoy playing the guitar, chess, Go, table tennis, and pool. I also had fun providing voice-over for radio dramas and school promotional videos.

    Try out a Gomoku Game with the robot I programmed!
    (Bot ID: 6363ccda832a161fc44b43d3)