Portrait
Nanxi Li
Undergraduate Student in Computer Science
Zhiyuan College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
About Me

I am a junior undergraduate in the JohnClass at Zhiyuan College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, majoring in Computer Science.

I am currently advised by Prof. Chaowei Xiao at Johns Hopkins University. Previously, I worked with Prof. Yong-Lu Li in the RHOS Lab at SJTU and interned at Tencent XuanWu Lab.

My research interests include multimodal learning, AI safety, and model security. I am always open to discussions and potential collaborations.

Education
  • Shanghai Jiao Tong University
    Zhiyuan College · JohnClass
    B.S. in Computer Science
    Sep. 2023 – present
Experience
  • SafoLab, Johns Hopkins University
    Research Intern · advised by Prof. Chaowei Xiao
  • XuanWu Lab, Tencent
    Research Intern · mentored by Jiashuo Liang and Guancheng Li
  • RHOS Lab (MVIG), Shanghai Jiao Tong University
    Research Intern · supervised by Prof. Yong-Lu Li
Honors & Awards
  • Irving T. Ho Fellowship
    2025
  • ICPC Regional Gold Medal × 3
    2023
  • NOI Silver Medal
    2022
Academic Service
  • Reviewer
    ICLR 2026 · NeurIPS 2026
News
2026
DynAuditClaw v1 was released as a dynamic auditing framework for OpenClaw. Read more
Apr 01
Scene Dynamic Field was accepted to ICLR 2026. Read the paper
Feb 01
Selected Publications View all
Teaser figure for Heuristic Reminders: Guiding Vision-Language Models Towards Safe and Faithful Reasoning
Heuristic Reminders: Guiding Vision-Language Models Towards Safe and Faithful Reasoning

Nanxi Li, Chaowei Xiao

SeT-LLM Workshop at KDD 2026

We propose a heuristic-guided reminding framework that injects targeted reminders during reasoning generation when safety violations or attention decay are detected. The method generates preference pairs for Direct Preference Optimization, reducing reward hacking while preserving benign utility and improving visual faithfulness.

Teaser figure for Heuristic Reminders: Guiding Vision-Language Models Towards Safe and Faithful Reasoning
Heuristic Reminders: Guiding Vision-Language Models Towards Safe and Faithful Reasoning

Nanxi Li, Chaowei Xiao

SeT-LLM Workshop at KDD 2026

We propose a heuristic-guided reminding framework that injects targeted reminders during reasoning generation when safety violations or attention decay are detected. The method generates preference pairs for Direct Preference Optimization, reducing reward hacking while preserving benign utility and improving visual faithfulness.

Teaser figure for LPG: Balancing Efficiency and Policy Reasoning in Latent Policy Guardrails
LPG: Balancing Efficiency and Policy Reasoning in Latent Policy Guardrails

Nanxi Li, Zhengyue Zhao, Chaowei Xiao

arXiv preprint 2026

We introduce a latent policy guardrail that compresses policy reasoning into an efficient representation while preserving grounded safety decisions.

Teaser figure for LPG: Balancing Efficiency and Policy Reasoning in Latent Policy Guardrails
LPG: Balancing Efficiency and Policy Reasoning in Latent Policy Guardrails

Nanxi Li, Zhengyue Zhao, Chaowei Xiao

arXiv preprint 2026

We introduce a latent policy guardrail that compresses policy reasoning into an efficient representation while preserving grounded safety decisions.

Teaser figure for Beyond Static Vision: Scene Dynamic Field Unlocks Intuitive Physics Understanding in Multi-modal Large Language Models
Beyond Static Vision: Scene Dynamic Field Unlocks Intuitive Physics Understanding in Multi-modal Large Language Models

Nanxi Li, Xiang Wang, Yuanjie Chen, Haode Zhang, Hong Li, Yong-Lu Li

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026

We propose Scene Dynamic Field, a framework that integrates physics simulators into multimodal large language model fine-tuning to improve intuitive physics understanding.

Teaser figure for Beyond Static Vision: Scene Dynamic Field Unlocks Intuitive Physics Understanding in Multi-modal Large Language Models
Beyond Static Vision: Scene Dynamic Field Unlocks Intuitive Physics Understanding in Multi-modal Large Language Models

Nanxi Li, Xiang Wang, Yuanjie Chen, Haode Zhang, Hong Li, Yong-Lu Li

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2026

We propose Scene Dynamic Field, a framework that integrates physics simulators into multimodal large language model fine-tuning to improve intuitive physics understanding.

Teaser figure for PRISM: Robust VLM Alignment with Principled Reasoning for Integrated Safety in Multimodality
PRISM: Robust VLM Alignment with Principled Reasoning for Integrated Safety in Multimodality

Nanxi Li, Zhengyue Zhao, G. Edward Suh, Marco Pavone, Chaowei Xiao

arXiv preprint, 2025

PRISM studies robust alignment for vision-language models with principled reasoning, addressing the trade-off between safety and benign utility.

Teaser figure for PRISM: Robust VLM Alignment with Principled Reasoning for Integrated Safety in Multimodality
PRISM: Robust VLM Alignment with Principled Reasoning for Integrated Safety in Multimodality

Nanxi Li, Zhengyue Zhao, G. Edward Suh, Marco Pavone, Chaowei Xiao

arXiv preprint, 2025

PRISM studies robust alignment for vision-language models with principled reasoning, addressing the trade-off between safety and benign utility.

Teaser figure for The Labyrinth of Links: Navigating the Associative Maze of Multi-modal LLMs
The Labyrinth of Links: Navigating the Associative Maze of Multi-modal LLMs

Hong Li, Nanxi Li, Yuanjie Chen, Jianbin Zhu, Qinlu Guo, Cewu Lu, Yong-Lu Li

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025

We introduce an association benchmark for multimodal large language models and an annotation-free reconstruction pipeline for evaluating associative reasoning.

Teaser figure for The Labyrinth of Links: Navigating the Associative Maze of Multi-modal LLMs
The Labyrinth of Links: Navigating the Associative Maze of Multi-modal LLMs

Hong Li, Nanxi Li, Yuanjie Chen, Jianbin Zhu, Qinlu Guo, Cewu Lu, Yong-Lu Li

International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025

We introduce an association benchmark for multimodal large language models and an annotation-free reconstruction pipeline for evaluating associative reasoning.

Open Source Projects
DynAuditClaw

A dynamic auditing framework for OpenClaw that continuously probes agent behavior, surfaces security risks, and helps developers evaluate agent workflows in realistic environments.