Xi Li is currently a Ph.D. candidate supervised by Dr. George Kesidis and Dr. David J. Miller with the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the Penn State University. She received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 2016, and the M.S. degree in Computer Science from the Penn State University in 2018.

Her research interests include trustworthy AI, adversarial machine learning, and deep learning. Her Ph.D. thesis focuses on poisoning attacks and defenses against deep neural networks. Her most recent work focuses on exploring the potential threats brought by integrating foundation models like large language models into machine learning systems such as federated learning.

She has papers published at conferences like ICCV, AAAI, and ICASSP. She also served as a reviewer for conferences including CVPR and KDD and for the journal Computers & Security.