Ph.D. Student · HKUST(GZ)

Siqi Lai

Urban Embodied Intelligence & LLM Agents

I study how LLM-powered embodied agents perceive, reason, and act in complex urban environments. My work connects foundation models with city-scale sensing and decision-making for mobility, navigation, and intelligent transportation.

LLM Agents Embodied AI Urban Intelligence

Google Scholar ↗ GitHub ↗ Email ↗

Siqi Lai
Information Hub, HKUST(GZ)

Recent

Two papers accepted at ICLR 2026 · USTBench and CoLLMLight

View publications ↓

01

About

I am a Ph.D. student at the Information Hub of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou).

I am supervised by Prof. Hao Liu and guided by Prof. Hui Xiong. Before joining HKUST(GZ), I received my B.Eng. from Wuhan University in 2022, where I was mentored by Prof. Chenliang Li.

My research focuses on urban embodied intelligence: building LLM agents that perceive multimodal city-scale environments, reason over spatial and temporal context, and act through navigation, mobility, and traffic-control tasks.

Beyond research

Photography, badminton, tennis, and Japanese language study (JLPT N3).

Education & Experience

2023—Present
Ph.D. StudentHKUST(GZ)
2022—2023
Research AssistantHKUST(GZ)
2018—2022
Bachelor of EngineeringWuhan University

Academic Service

KDD CCF-ASession Chair & Outstanding Reviewer (Top 10%)
Conference ReviewerThe Web Conference · AAAI · NeurIPS CCF-A
Journal ReviewerTOIS CCF-A · TIST CCF-B · TKDD CCF-B

02

Selected
Publications

Google Scholar ↗

KDD2025CCF-A

LLMLight framework

LLMLight: Large Language Models as Traffic Signal Control Agents

Siqi Lai, Zhao Xu, Weijia Zhang, Hao Liu, Hui Xiong

Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Gold Medal & Special Award, Geneva 2025 · KDD Audience Appreciation Award

ICLR2026CCF-A

USTBench framework

USTBench: Benchmarking and Dissecting Spatiotemporal Reasoning of LLMs as Urban Agents

Siqi Lai, Yansong Ning, Zirui Yuan, Zhixi Chen, Hao Liu

The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations

ICLR2026CCF-A

CoLLMLight framework

CoLLMLight: Cooperative Large Language Model Agents for Network-Wide Traffic Signal Control

Zirui Yuan, Siqi Lai, Hao Liu

The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations

WWW2026CCF-A

Cooperative multi-vehicle navigation framework

An LLM-Powered Cooperative Framework for Large-Scale Multi-Vehicle Navigation

Yuping Zhou, Siqi Lai, Jindong Han, Hao Liu

The ACM Web Conference 2026

ECML-PKDD2025CCF-B

Bkd-FedGNN framework

Bkd-FedGNN: A Benchmark for Classification Backdoor Attacks on Federated Graph Neural Networks

Fan Liu, Siqi Lai, Yansong Ning, Hao Liu

Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases

KDD2023CCF-A

Vehicle energy estimation framework

A Preference-Aware Meta-Optimization Framework for Personalized Vehicle Energy Consumption Estimation

Siqi Lai, Weijia Zhang, Hao Liu

Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

SIGIR2022CCF-A

Mirror graph network framework

An Attribute-Driven Mirror Graph Network for Session-Based Recommendation

Siqi Lai, Erli Meng, Fan Zhang, Chenliang Li, Bin Wang, Aixin Sun

Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference

03

Awards &
Honors

2025

KDD Audience Appreciation Award certificate

Audience Appreciation Award

ACM SIGKDD 2025 · LLMLight

2025

Gold medal from the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva

Gold Medal

50th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva, Switzerland

2025

Swiss Automobile Club special award trophy

Special Award — Swiss Automobile Club Prize

50th International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva, Switzerland

2021

Academic award icon

Academic Scholarship & Outstanding Student

Wuhan University

2020

Silver medal

Second Prize, China Software Cup

Computer vision-based traffic scene smart application · Nanjing, China

04

Visual Notes

Photography is how I pause, observe, and notice the structure of places beyond datasets and models.

Historic ocean liner by the harbor — 01

Landscape photograph from Siqi Lai's visual notes — 02

Travel photograph from Siqi Lai's visual notes — 03

Urban scene from Siqi Lai's visual notes — 04

Landscape from Siqi Lai's visual notes — 05

City photograph from Siqi Lai's visual notes — 06

Architecture photograph from Siqi Lai's visual notes — 07

HKUST Guangzhou campus under a blue sky — 08

Campus photograph from Siqi Lai's visual notes — 09

05

Global Visitors

A live view of where this homepage is being discovered, collected since August 2026.

Live visitor map

Visitor countries

World map showing visitor countries and total page views

06

Contact

I welcome conversations and collaborations around LLM agents, embodied AI, and urban intelligence.

Direct contact

HKUST(GZ)

Email: slai125[at]connect.hkust-gz.edu.cn
Affiliation: Information Hub · HKUST(GZ)
Location: Guangzhou, China
WeChat: SQLai2099

Google Scholar ↗ GitHub ↗