About Me

I’m a Visiting Student Researcher at Sky Computing Lab at UC Berkeley, advised by Prof. Ion Stoica. I also work with Prof. Joseph E. Gonzalez and Prof. Matei Zaharia. I’m completing my B.S. in Computer Science (Turing Honors Class) at Renmin University of China.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in designing efficient systems for ML, focusing on cloud resource orchestration, distributed training infrastructure, and compound AI systems addressing the growing resource demands of diverse AI applications. I am also interested in exploring how AI techniques can advance systems design methodologies.

News

Aug 2025: SkyWalker accepted to EuroSys 2026!
Aug 2025: Received CCF Elite Collegiate Award (<100 recipients nationally)
Jul 2025: Started visiting UC Berkeley Sky Computing Lab
May 2025: Received Dean’s Scholarship, Gaoling School of AI

Selected Publications

* denotes equal contribution

SkyWalker: A Locality-Aware Cross-Region Load Balancer for LLM Inference
Tian Xia, Ziming Mao, Jamison Kerney, Ethan J. Jackson, Zhifei Li, Jiarong Xing, Scott Shenker, Ion Stoica
EuroSys 2026
[Paper]

SkyNomad: Cost-Effective Multi-Region Scheduling for Deadline-Sensitive Workloads on Spot Instances
Zhifei Li*, Tian Xia*, and others, Ion Stoica
OSDI 2026 (In submission)

LEANN: A Low-Storage Vector Index for Personal Devices
Yichuan Wang, Zhifei Li, Shu Liu, Yongji Wu, Ziming Mao, Yilong Zhao, Xiao Yan, Zhiying Xu, Yang Zhou, Ion Stoica, Sewon Min, Matei Zaharia, Joseph E. Gonzalez
ICML 2025 Workshop on Vector Databases | MLSys 2026 (In submission)
[Paper]

Barbarians at the Gate: How AI is Upending Systems Research
Audrey Cheng*, Shu Liu*, Melissa Pan*, Zhifei Li, Bowen Wang, Alex Krentsel, Tian Xia, Mert Cemri, Jongseok Park, Shuo Yang, Jeff Chen, Aditya Desai, Jiarong Xing, Koushik Sen, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica
arXiv 2024
[Paper]

FrontierCS: The Next Frontier of Computer Science
Qiuyang Mang*, Wenhao Cai*, Zhifei Li*, Huanzhi Mao*, and others, Ion Stoica, Jingbo Shang, Zhuang Liu, Alvin Cheung
arXiv 2024
[Paper]

Open Source

SkyPilot (9.1k+ ★) - Run AI on Any Infra
Top 10 contributor; 70+ issues, 50+ PRs merged; 30,000+ lines of code contributed
Built High Availability Controller for SkyServe, adopted by startups including Hypermode

LEANN (5.2k+ ★) - The Smallest Vector Index
Led research-to-production translation; 40k+ community downloads
Technical outreach achieving 600k+ views

Awards

CCF Elite Collegiate Award (CCF优秀大学生奖, <100 recipients nationally), Aug 2025
Dean’s Scholarship (院长奖学金), Gaoling School of AI (15/2000), May 2025
National Scholarship (国家奖学金, Top 0.2% nationally), Sep 2024
First-Class Scholarship for Social Service (社会工作一等奖学金, 48/35000), Sep 2023
First Prize, National Olympiad in Informatics in Provinces (NOIP省一), Dec 2019

Services

USENIX ATC ‘25 Artifact Evaluation Committee
Head Teaching Assistant, Introduction to Computer Systems (ICS), Fall 2024 & Spring 2025
President, RUC Computer Association, Jul 2024 - Jul 2025