RUI LI
PhD Candidate in Computer Science at Northeastern University.
370 WVH
Northeastern University
Boston, MA
My research focuses on ML for Systems and Systems for AI. I began by working on ML for systems, but realized that advancing the field requires a deep understanding of underlying systems. This led me to pursue a PhD in systems, where I focus first on systems research and then on applying those insights to systems for ML.
I am currently a PhD candidate in Computer Science at Northeastern University, advised by Prof. Gene Cooperman and Prof. Devesh Tiwari. I received my M.S. in Computer Science from Tsinghua University, advised by Prof. Shu-Tao Xia and Prof. Xi Xiao, and my B.Eng. in Computer Science from Nankai University.
My industry experience includes a research internship at Bytedance Seed, a full-time role as Algorithm Engineer II at Alibaba Cloud, and an internship at Tencent WeChat. I have extensive hands-on experience debugging and optimizing production-scale cloud and AI infrastructures.
news
| Jul 16, 2025 | BootSeer released on arXiv! This is the first work to analyze startup overhead in large language model training jobs. |
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| May 13, 2025 | HotSwap paper accepted at IEEE CLOUD 2025! The conference will be held in Helsinki, Finland. |
| Jan 15, 2025 | Started research internship at Bytedance Seed, working on training infrastructure optimization for large-scale AI systems. |
selected publications
BootSeer: Analyzing and Mitigating Initialization Bottlenecks in Large-Scale LLM Training
Li, Rui, Zhi, Xiaoyun, Chi, Jinxin, Yu, Menghan, Huang, Lixin, Zhu, Jia, Zhang, Weilun, Ma, Xing, Liu, Wenjia, Zhu, Zhicheng, others
arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.12619 (2025)
PDFHotSwap: Enabling Live Dependency Sharing in Serverless Computing
Li, Rui, Cooperman, Gene, Tiwari, Devesh
Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing (CLOUD) (2025)
PDFAutomated Intelligent Healing for Cloud-Scale Data Centers
Li, Rui, Cheng, Zhinan, Lee, Patrick P. C., Wang, Pinghui, Qiang, Yi, Lan, Lin, He, Cheng, Lu, Jinlong, Wang, Mian, Ding, Xinquan
40th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS) (2021)
DOIEBSNN: Extended Byte Segment Neural Network for Network Traffic Classification
Xiao, Xi, Xiao, Wentao, Li, Rui, Luo, Xiapu, Zheng, Hai-Tao, Xia, Shu-Tao
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (2021)
DOINovel Dynamic Multiple Classification System for Network Traffic
Xiao, Xi, Li, Rui, Zheng, Hai-Tao, Ye, Runguo, KumarSangaiah, Arun, Xia, Shutao
Information Sciences (2019)
DOIByte Segment Neural Network for Network Traffic Classification
Li, Rui, Xiao, Xi, Ni, Shiguang, Zheng, Haitao, Xia, Shutao
Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 26th International Symposium on Quality of Service (2018)
DOI