Hello! I’m Zikun Li, currently in my third year as a PhD candidate at the Computer Science Department of Carnegie Mellon University, under the esteemed guidance of Prof. Zhihao Jia. My research primarily revolves around Large Language Models and Reinforcement Learning, particularly exploring their synergy with computer systems.

I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Peking University in 2021. My time at PKU was enriched by the opportunity to collaborate with Prof. Tong Yang on developing advanced algorithms for data stream mining.

News

23/01/2025 We release AdaServe, a system for high-throughput SLO-customized LLM serving with speculative decoding. Check it out here!

23/01/2025 TidalDecode is accepted by ICLR ‘25! 🎊

23/12/2023 Quarl got accepted by OOPSLA ‘24! 🎊

Preprints

• AdaServe: SLO-Customized LLM Serving with Fine-Grained Speculative Decoding
  Zikun Li*, Zhuofu Chen*, Remi Delacourt, Gabriele Oliaro, Zeyu Wang, Qinghan Chen, Shuhuai Lin, April Yang, Zhihao Zhang, Zhuoming Chen, Sean Lai, Xupeng Miao and Zhihao Jia (* indicates equal contribution)

Publications

• [ICLR ‘25] TidalDecode: Fast and Accurate LLM Decoding with Position Persistent Sparse Attention
  Lijie Yang*, Zhihao Zhang*, Zhuofu Chen, Zikun Li and Zhihao Jia (* indicates equal contribution)

• [OOPSLA ‘24] Quarl: A Learning-Based Quantum Circuit Optimizer
  Zikun Li, Jinjun Peng, Yixuan Mei, Sina Lin, Yi Wu, Oded Padon and Zhihao Jia

• [PLDI ‘22] Quartz: superoptimization of Quantum circuits
  Mingkuan Xu, Zikun Li, Oded Padon, Sina Lin, Jessica Pointing, Auguste Hirth, Henry Ma, Jens Palsberg, Alex Aiken, Umut A Acar and Zhihao Jia

• [SIGMOD ‘21] BurstSketch: Finding Bursts in Data Streams
  Zheng Zhong*, Shen Yan*, Zikun Li*, Decheng Tan, Tong Yang and Bin Cui. (* indicates equal contribution)

• [SIGKDD ‘20] WavingSketch: An Unbiased and Generic Sketch for Finding Top-k Items in Data Streams
  Jizhou Li*, Zikun Li*, Yifei Xu*, Shiqi Jiang, Tong Yang, Bin Cui, Yafei Dai and Gong Zhang. (* indicates equal contribution)

Teaching

• TA of 15418/618 Parallel Computer Architecture and Programming, 2023 Fall

Miscellaneous

• I play tennis 🥎 in my spare time.