Mingchen Li

Mingchen Li

Ph.D. Student · Computer Science · UMass Amherst

I am a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. My research focuses on large language models, agentic retrieval, deep research, reasoning, and AI for biomedicine.

General AI: Agents, Retrieval, and Reasoning

I am interested in building LLM-based agents for reasoning, planning, retrieval, tool use, and self-evolution across diverse tasks. My research focuses on improving the effectiveness, efficiency, reliability, and adaptability of agentic AI systems, including how they use external tools and knowledge, reflect on their own decisions, and adjust their strategies during problem solving.

AI for Biomedicine and Healthcare

My research interests also lie in AI for biomedicine and healthcare, including large language models, retrieval-augmented generation, clinical prediction, biomedical information extraction, medical reasoning, and knowledge graph learning. My work includes applications in cancer, opioid overdose risk prediction, and other clinical prediction tasks, with the goal of developing reliable and efficient AI systems to support biomedical research, clinical diagnosis, and healthcare decision-making.

Publications

Complete list: Google Scholar profile.

General AI

  1. RICE-PO: Turning Retrieval Interactions into Credit Signals for Reasoning Agents

    Mingchen Li, Hansi Zeng, Zhuo Qian, Jiatan Huang, Sunjae Kwon, Hamed Zamani, Hong Yu

    NeurIPS 2026pdf

  2. In-Context Optimization for Retrieval-Augmented Generation: A Gradient-Descent Perspective

    Mingchen Li, Jiatan Huang, Chuxu Zhang, Liang Zhao, Hong Yu

    NeurIPS 2026pdf

  3. A condensed transition graph framework for zero-shot link prediction with large language models

    Mingchen Li, Chen Ling, Rui Zhang, Liang Zhao

    ICDM 2024pdfcode

  4. Understand the Dynamic World: An End-to-End Knowledge Informed Framework for Open Domain Entity State Tracking

    Mingchen Li, Lifu Huang

    SIGIR 2023pdfcode

  5. Semantic Structure based Query Graph Prediction for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph

    Mingchen Li, Shihao Ji

    COLING 2022pdfcode

  6. A Hierarchical N-Gram Framework for Zero-Shot Link Prediction

    Mingchen Li, Junfan Chen, Samuel Mensah, Nikolaos Aletras, Xiulong Yang, Yang Ye

    EMNLP 2022 (Finding track)pdfcode

  7. Counterfactual Graph for Multi-Agent LLM Calibration

    Jiatan Huang, Mingchen Li, Ziming Li, Sunjae Kwon, Hong Yu, Chuxu Zhang

    arXiv preprint 2026pdf

Biomedicine & Healthcare

  1. Efficient and Effective Internal Memory Retrieval for LLM-Based Healthcare Prediction.

    Mingchen Li, Jiatan Huang, Hong Yu

    ACL 2026 Findingpdf

  2. CancerLLM: a large language model in cancer domain

    Mingchen Li, Zaifu Zhan, Jiatan Huang, Jeremy Yeung, Kai Ding, Anne Blaes, Steven Johnson, Hongfang Liu, Hua Xu , Rui Zhang

    NPJ Digital Medicine 2026pdfcode

  3. Benchmarking retrieval-augmented large language models in biomedical nlp: Application, robustness, and self-awareness

    Mingchen Li, Zaifu Zhan, Han Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Jiatan Huang, Rui Zhang

    Science Advance 2026pdfcode

  4. BiomedRAG: A retrieval augmented large language model for biomedicine

    Mingchen Li, Halil Kilicoglu, Hua Xu, Rui Zhang

    Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI) 162, 104769 2025pdfcode

  5. RT: a Retrieving and Chain-of-Thought framework for few-shot medical named entity recognition

    Mingchen Li, Huixue Zhou, Han Yang, Rui Zhang

    Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) 31 (9), 1929 ... 2024pdfcode

  6. RiTeK: A Dataset for Large Language Models Complex Reasoning over Textual Knowledge Graphs in Medicine

    Jiatan Huang, Mingchen Li, Dawei Li, Yuxin Zhang, Zhichao Yang, Yongkang Xiao, Feiyun Ouyang, Xiaohan Li, Shuo Han, Hong Yu

    ACL 2026 Findingspdfdatacode

  7. RAMIE: retrieval-augmented multi-task information extraction with large language models on dietary supplements

    Zaifu Zhan, Shuang Zhou, Mingchen Li, Rui Zhang

    Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) 32 (3), 545-554 2025pdfcode

  8. Large language model synergy for ensemble learning in medical question answering: design and evaluation study

    Han Yang, Mingchen Li, Huixue Zhou, Yongkang Xiao, Qian Fang, Shuang Zhou, Rui Zhang

    Journal of Medical Internet Research 27, e70080 2025pdfcode

  9. LEAP: LLM instruction-example adaptive prompting framework for biomedical relation extraction

    Huixue Zhou, Mingchen Li, Yongkang Xiao, Han Yang, Rui Zhang

    Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) 31 (9), 2010 ... 2024pdf

  10. Fuselinker: Leveraging Llm's Pre-Trained Text Embeddings and Domain Knowledge to Enhance Gnn-Based Link Prediction on Biomedical Knowledge Graphs

    Yongkang Xiao, Shuang Zhang, Huixue Zhou, Mingchen Li, Han Yang, Rui Zhang

    Journal of Biomedical Informatics (JBI) 2024pdf

  11. A Review of Reinforcement Learning for Natural Language Processing, and Applications in Healthcare

    Ying Liu, Haozhu Wang, Huixue Zhou, Mingchen Li, Yu Hou, Shuang Zhou, Fang Wang, Rama Hoetzlein, Rui Zhang

    Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) 2023pdf

Experience

  • PhD Student, Computer Science, UMass Amherst. 09.2024 - Present
  • Researcher, University of Minnesota Twin Cities. 01.2023 - 08.2024
  • Research Assistant, Georgia State University. 01.2021 - 12.2022

Service

  • Reviewer — Journals: Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Expert Systems with Applications, Information Processing & Management, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Knowledge-Based Systems, Npj Health Systems
  • Reviewer — Conferences: EMNLP 2022, ACL 2023, EMNLP 2023, EMNLP Industry Track 2023, IEEE ICHI 2023, NAACL 2024, EACL 2026, EMNLP 2026, NIPS 2026, AAAI 2027, ICLR 2027

Contact

Google Scholar: scholar profile

GitHub: ToneLi

Email: mingchenli@umass.edu