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, 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).

The First Expert-Level General 6-Max NLH GTO Poker AI

I am focus on multi-player no-limit hold’em AI with real-world settings including cash/MTT/(and other rules) with arbitrary initial chips. I am seeking poker professional players (especially MTT top players) willing to participate in multiplayer poker testing. Please let me know if you want to play against our multi-player GTO poker AI and become the best poker player in the world.

Agent	Play Online	Multi-way Postflop	Preflop	GTO Strategy
Poker Solver	No	3-Max	Only No-limp, and computational costly	Yes
Our AI	Yes	6-Max	With limp, cold-call 3b and any bet sizes	Yes

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

2. LLM Distillation for Explainable Nash Equilibrium Play.

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