About Me

Hi! My name is Boning Li (李泊宁 in Chinese).

I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS), Tsinghua University, where I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Longbo Huang.

Prior to my Ph.D., I received my Bachelor’s degree of Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University (ACM Class) in Computer Science.

Research Interest

My research interests focus on scalable and efficient artificial intelligence for imperfect information games, especially Texas Hold’em poker. To achieve this, I primarily focus on:

• Efficient multiplayer poker AI (search, CFR, self-play RL)
• Efficient PLO AI (Abstraction, pruning)
• Optimising betting sizes in poker (DRL)
• Efficient AI for MTT beyond ICM (MARL)
• LLM for poker strategy (LLM agent)

I am very willing to engage in in-depth cooperation with individuals or institutions that can provide support for the above topics (my email: li-bn22@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn).

I am focus on multi-player no-limit hold’em AI. Our AI could handle arbitrary initial chip stacks, multiple rules, off-tree opponent actions, up to 6-player postflop situations (e.g. all players limp pot), and output full hand strategy within seconds. I am seeking volunteers willing to participate in multiplayer poker AI testing.

Selected Publications

1. Boning Li, Longbo Huang, “Efficient Online Pruning and Abstraction for Imperfect Information Extensive-Form Games,” Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), April 2025.
2. Boning Li, Zhixuan Fang, Longbo Huang, “RL-CFR: Improving Action Abstraction for Imperfect Information Extensive-Form Games with Reinforcement Learning,” Proceedings of the Forty-first International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), July 2024.
3. Boning Li, Yingce Xia, Shufang Xie, Lijun Wu, Tao Qin, “Distance-Enhanced Graph Neural Network for Link Prediction,” in the Thirty-eight International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Workshop on Computational Biology, July 2021.

Working Papers

1. Ultra Efficient Search Framework for Imperfect Information Extensive-Form Games. (under review)

2. LLM Distillation for Explainable Nash Equilibrium Play. (under review)

3. Expert-Level Artificial Intelligence in 6-Max No-Limit Poker with Arbitrary Settings.

Selected Awards

Silver Medal 8th place, 42th ACM-ICPC World Finals, 2018

Gold Medal 3rd place, ICPC Asia Xuzhou Regional Contest, 2018

Gold Medal 2nd place, CCPC Qinhuangdao Regional Contest, 2018

Power of Role Models, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Outstanding Student (Top 0.1%), 2018

Gold Medal 5th place, ICPC Asia EC League Final Contest, 2017

Gold Medal 3rd place, CCPC Final Contest, 2017

Gold Medal 2nd place, ICPC Asia Beijing Regional Contest, 2017

Gold Medal 2nd place, CCPC Hangzhou Regional Contest, 2017

Gold Medal 7th place, ICPC Asia Xi’an Regional Contest, 2017

Zhiyuan Honorary Scholarship, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2017-2020

Gold Medal 1st place, National Olympiad in Informatics (NOI) Invitation, 2016

First Prize 1st place, National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces (NOIP), 2016

Gold Medal, Asia-Pacific Informatics Olympiad (APIO), 2016

Gold Medal, China Team Selection Competition (CTSC), 2016

Gold Medal, National Olympiad in Informatics Winter Camp (NOIWC), 2016

Research Intern Experience

Microsoft Research Asia (Advisor: Dr. Yingce Xia), 07/2020 - 01/2021

X-LANCE, Cross Media Language Intelligence Lab (Advisor: Prof. Kai Yu), 07/2019 - 06/2020

Academic Services

Reviewer: NeuIPS, ICLR, ICML