Hi, I am Wenjie!

I am a Ph.D. student in Neural Computation at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Yonatan Bisk.

My research investigates concept representations in humans and machines. I am interested in how language is grounded in actions and the physical environment.

Prior to starting my Ph.D., I was an Assistant Research Scientist at NYU, working with Brenden Lake. Before that, I worked with Guangyu Robert Yang at MIT. I received my M.S. in Computer Science from NYU and my B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis.

The north star of my intellectual curiosity is the tension between continuity and discreteness (or, sensorimotor experience and symbols). Beyond research, I enjoy dancing Argentine Tango.

Feel free to reach out if you would like to connect!

Machine Cognition · Concept · Representation · Grounding · Language and Robotics

Publications

Li, Jiaqi, Isabelle Boni, Lucy R. Sandwick, Emily M. Sanford, Caroline M. DeLong, Wenjie Li, et al. “Continuity in geometric intuition between humans and monkeys.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 123, no. 30 (2026): e2532934123.

Li, Wenjie, Maggie Henderson, Yonatan Bisk, and Jessica Cantlon. “Artificial Neural Networks Reveal a Cognitive Continuum Toward Human Abstraction.” In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol. 47. 2025.

Li, Wenjie, Shannon C. Yasuda, Moira R. Dillon, and Brenden M. Lake. “An Infant-Cognition Inspired Machine Benchmark for Identifying Agency, Affiliation, Belief, and Intention.” In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, vol. 46. 2024.

Yasuda, Shannon C., Wenjie Li, Deisy Martinez, Brenden M. Lake, and Moira R. Dillon. “15‐Month‐Olds’ Understanding of Imitation in Social and Instrumental Contexts.” Infancy 30, no. 1 (2025): e70002.

Li, Wenjie, and Yao Li. “Entropy, mutual information, and systematic measures of structured spiking neural networks.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 501 (2020): 110310.