Charlie C. Li

32-G934

32 Vassar Street

Cambridge, MA 02139

I am Charlie (Chao) Li, a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) advised by Dina Katabi. My research centers on cross-modality generative modeling, with applications in contactless health monitoring and visual generation. I am a current MIT HEALS Graduate Fellow and a former Wellcome Trust Fellow.

I was formerly a Research Scientist Intern at FAIR, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) and at Meta Recommendation Systems (MRS), studying the intersection between representation learning and text-to-image generative models.

I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, graduating at the top of my department and receiving the prestigious E.M. Williams Award. During my time at CMU, I had the privilege of being mentored by Professors Swarun Kumar and Nancy Pollard, and I also served as President of Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Chapter, the university’s Electrical Engineering Honor Society.

Outside of research, I love to hike and explore nature. I also happen to be a huge sitcom nerd, and hold the (controversial) opinion that Community is the best sitcom ever made.

Latest News

Sep 1, 2026	Started as an MIT HEALS Graduate Fellow in the 2026–27 cohort.
Jul 7, 2026	Presented our poster on Physiology as Language: Translating Respiration to EEG during Sleep at ICML 2026 in Seoul, South Korea.
Jul 4, 2026	Started as a Research Scientist Intern at FAIR, Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL).
Jun 1, 2026	Became a doctoral candidate (all but thesis).
Apr 30, 2026	Physiology as Language: Translating Respiration to EEG during Sleep was accepted at ICML 2026.
May 27, 2025	Started as a Research Scientist Intern at Meta Recommendation Systems (MRS).
May 23, 2025	Completed my Research Qualifying Exam (RQE).
Sep 1, 2023	Became a Wellcome Trust Fellow at the MIT Jameel Clinic.

Selected Publications

ICML

Physiology as Language: Translating Respiration to EEG during Sleep

Kaiwen Zha*, Chao Li*, Hao He*, and 7 more authors

In Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026

*Co-first authors

arXiv Bib HTML

@inproceedings{zha2026physiology,
  title = {Physiology as Language: Translating Respiration to EEG during Sleep},
  author = {Zha*, Kaiwen and Li*, Chao and He*, Hao and Cao, Peng and Li, Tianhong and Mirzazadeh, Ali and Zhang, Ellen and Lee, Jong Woo and Kim, Yoon and Katabi, Dina},
  note = {*Co-first authors},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2602.00526},
}

arXiv

Unifying Contrastive and Generative Objectives for Visual Understanding and Text-to-Image Generation

Chao Li, Tianhong Li, Sai Vidyaranya Nuthalapati, and 9 more authors

arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.02667, 2026

arXiv Bib HTML

@article{li2026unifying,
  title = {Unifying Contrastive and Generative Objectives for Visual Understanding and Text-to-Image Generation},
  author = {Li, Chao and Li, Tianhong and Nuthalapati, Sai Vidyaranya and Chen, Hong-You and Shukla, Satya Narayan and Cheng, Jianpeng and Yang, Yonghuan and Xiao, Jun and Fan, Xiangjun and Singh, Aashu and Katabi, Dina and Mishra, Shlok Kumar},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.02667},
  year = {2026},
  eprint = {2603.02667},
}

What radio waves tell us about sleep!

Hao He*, Chao Li*, Wolfgang Ganglberger, and 7 more authors

Sleep, Aug 2024

*Co-first authors

Bib HTML PDF

@article{10.1093/sleep/zsae187,
  title = {What radio waves tell us about sleep!},
  author = {He*, Hao and Li*, Chao and Ganglberger, Wolfgang and Gallagher, Kaileigh and Hristov, Rumen and Ouroutzoglou, Michail and Sun, Haoqi and Sun, Jimeng and Westover, M Brandon and Katabi, Dina},
  note = {*Co-first authors},
  journal = {Sleep},
  pages = {zsae187},
  year = {2024},
  month = aug,
  issn = {0161-8105},
  doi = {10.1093/sleep/zsae187},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsae187},
  dimensions = {true}
}

SoftTouch: A Sensor-Placement Framework for Soft Robotic Hands

Chao Li, and Nancy Pollard

In 2022 IEEE-RAS 21st International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), Aug 2022

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{10000138,
  title = {SoftTouch: A Sensor-Placement Framework for Soft Robotic Hands},
  author = {Li, Chao and Pollard, Nancy},
  booktitle = {2022 IEEE-RAS 21st International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {504-511},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1109/Humanoids53995.2022.10000138},
  dimensions = {true}
}

Exploring mmWave Radar and Camera Fusion for High-Resolution and Long-Range Depth Imaging

Akarsh Prabhakara, Diana Zhang, Chao Li, and 4 more authors

In 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Aug 2022

Bib HTML

@inproceedings{9982080,
  title = {Exploring mmWave Radar and Camera Fusion for High-Resolution and Long-Range Depth Imaging},
  author = {Prabhakara, Akarsh and Zhang, Diana and Li, Chao and Munir, Sirajum and Sankaranarayanan, Aswin C. and Rowe, Anthony and Kumar, Swarun},
  booktitle = {2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {3995-4002},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1109/iros47612.2022.9982080},
  dimensions = {true}
}