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I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student @ IIIS, Tsinghua.

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About Me

Hi! My name is Boning Li (李泊宁 in Chinese). My email: li-bn22@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn.

I am a final-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.

The Strongest 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, which can quickly handle various complex scenarios. I remain open to academic and business collaborations.

Agent Play Online Multi-way Postflop Preflop GTO Strategy
Poker Solver No 3-Max Only No-limp, and computational costly Yes
Our AI Yes 9-Max With limp, cold-call 3b and any bet sizes Yes

Research Framework

My research focuses on scalable and efficient artificial intelligence for imperfect information games, especially Poker. My research framework includes Poker Solver, Poker LLM, and Poker Agent.

Poker Solver

  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. Paper
  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. Paper Code
  3. Boning Li, Longbo Huang. Effective, Efficient, and General Information Abstraction for Imperfect-Information Extensive-Form Games. (under review) Paper Code
  4. Boning Li, Longbo Huang. Real-Time Parallel Counterfacual Regret Minimization. (under review) Paper
  5. Boning Li, Yu Chen, Longbo Huang. Correlated Chance Sampling for Monte Carlo Counterfactual Regret. (under review) Paper
  6. Boning Li, Longbo Huang. GPU-CFR: 80x Faster Counterfactual Regret Minimization by Compiling the Game to Static Dataflow and CUDA Graph Replay. (under review) Paper Code

Poker LLM

  1. Boning Li, Baoxiang Wang, Longbo Huang. PokerSkill: LLMs Can Play Expert-Level Poker without Training or Solvers. (under review) Paper Code
  2. Han Wang, Philippe Beardsell, Boning Li, Aaron Sasmita, Shuai Li, Hongyuan Zha, Baoxiang Wang. Solver-Guided Reasoning for Mixed-Equilibrium Strategies. Paper
  3. Boning Li, others. Auditing LLM Fine-Tuning on Imperfect-Information Game Logs. (under review) Paper

Poker Agent

  1. Boning Li, Longbo Huang, “Abstraction Agent: LLM-guided Abstraction for Imperfect-Information Games,“ Findings on the Thirty-first Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Oct 2026. Paper Code
  2. Boning Li, Longbo Huang. Agents That Certify Their Own Exploits: Confidence-Scheduled Restricted Responses for Safe Opponent Exploitation. (under review) Paper
  3. Boning Li, Yu Chen, Longbo Huang. AV-AIVAT: 74x Cheaper Agent Evaluation with Certified Anytime-Valid Stopping in Imperfect-Information Games. (under review) Paper
  4. Boning Li, Longbo Huang. ICM Out! Better Tournament Strategy from Computed Continuations, vs. Solvers and LLMs. (under review) Paper

Other Researches

  1. 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. Paper Code
  2. Jiasen Li, Xun Gong, Boning Li, “End-to-end texture-aware and depth-aware embedded advertising for videos,” in the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer and Technology Applications, April 2020

Selected Awards

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

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

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

Gold Medal 2nd place, CCPC Qinhuangdao Regional Contest, 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, 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 (Gold Reviewer), AAAI, TMLR