About me (Curriculum Vitae)

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Computer Science at the University of Bristol and a faculty member of the Machine Learning and Computer Vision MaVi group. Before that, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at KAUST, working with Prof. Mohamed Elhoseiny, and at NYU, working with Prof. Yi Fang. My research focuses on multimodal large language models, computer vision, and remote sensing. I have published over 60 papers in top venues in computer vision and remote sensing, such as CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, TVCG, and TGRS, with over citations on Google Scholar and an h-index of 28. I contributed to the well-known MiniGPT-4 project with over 4000 citations on Google Scholar, and developed the first GPT-based multimodal LLM for remote sensing imagery - RSGPT. I served as an Area Chair for ICLR 2026 and a Guest Editor for several prestigious journals, including IEEE GRSM, IEEE JSTARS, and GSIS. I received the IEEE GRSS Early Career Award 2025 for high-impact research in computer vision methods in remote sensing applications.

🔥Hiring PhD students and interns: Welcome enthusiastic students passionate about multimodal LLMs, 3D vision, and remote sensing to apply for PhD positions and internships.

🔥 News

[04/2026] Geo-R1 was accepted for publication at ISPRS J.
[03/2026] I will serve as an Area Chair for NeruIPS 2026.
[02/2026] One paper accepted for publication at CVPR 2026.
[02/2026] RS-RAG was accepted for publication at IEEE GRSM.
[01/2026] One paper accepted for publication at ICLR 2026.
[10/2025] We released Geo-R1, a reasoning-centric MLLM for aerial imagery.
[09/2025] REOBench was accepted for publication at NeurIPS 2025 Datasets & Benchmarks Track.
[09/2025] I will serve as an Area Chair of ICLR 2026.
[09/2025] I joined the University of Bristol as a Lecturer in Computer Vision.
[08/2025] I received the IEEE GRSS Early Career Award 2025.
[08/2025] 3DCoMPaT++ was accepted for publication at IEEE TPAMI.
[07/2025] I am honored to serve as the Guest Editor for the Special Issue titled "Advancing Geospatial Image Perception and Understanding Under Challenging Real-World Conditions" in the journal Geo-spatial Information Science (GSIS).
[07/2025] One paper on visual grounding GeoGound was accepted for publication at ICCV 2025 SEA workshop.
[06/2025] One paper on few-shot oriented object detection (FOMC) was accepted by IEEE TGRS.
[06/2025] I joined ELLIS, a pan-European AI network of excellence.
[05/2025] We released REOBench: A benchmark for evaluating the robustness of Earth observation foundation models.
[05/2025] I gave a seminar talk on "Large Vision Language Models in Remote Sensing: Datasets and Models" at the Data Assimilation Research Center.
[04/2025] Stable-SPAM was accepted for publication at ICLR 2025 Workshop SCOPE.
[03/2025] RSGPT was accepted for publication at ISPRS J.. RSGPT is the first attempt at GPT-based MLLMs in remote sensing.
[03/2025] Stable-SPAM was accepted for publication at COLM.
[12/2024] Opening position: One fully funded PhD position in AI for Bioversity (closed).
[10/2024] I joined the University of Reading as a Lecturer in Computer Science.
[09/2024] Two papers accepted at NeruIPS 2024 Datasets and Benchmarks Track VRSBench and 3DCoMPaT200.
[07/2024] One paper on 3D LLM (Uni3DL) was accepted by ECCV 2024.
[07/2024] I will serve as the Guest Editor for the special issue "Vision-Language Models in Remote Sensing" at IEEE GRSM.
[06/2024] I'm co-organizing the C3DV 2024: 2nd Workshop on Compositional 3D Vision at CVPR 2024.
[05/2024] One paper on few-shot object detection (InfRS) was accepted by IEEE TGRS.
[05/2024] Our paper on LSTM-based method for time-series CO₂ mapping was published at JAG.
[04/2024] Our survey paper Vision-Language Models in Remote Sensing was published at IEEE GRSM.
[03/2024] I gave a talk "AI for Earth Observation" at Prof. Matthew McCabe's lab.
[11/2023] RS-CLIP was published at JAG.
[10/2023] We released MiniGPT-v2, an enhanced version of MiniGPT-4 that supports multiple vision-language tasks.
[07/2023] We released RSGPT, the first GPT-based multimodal LLM in remote sensing.
[05/2023] We released the survey paper Vision-Language Models in Remote Sensing.
[04/2023] We released MiniGPT-4, the first open-source MLLM replicates advanced multi-modal abilities demonstrated by GPT-4V.

Selected Publications

[# denotes equal contribution, * denotes corresponding author]

	MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models. Deyao Zhu, Jun Chen, Xiaoqian Shen, Xiang Li, Mohamed Elhoseiny. ICLR, 2024 [project] [paper] [code] [huggingface demo]
	MiniGPT-v2: Large Language Model as a Unified Interface for Vision-Language Multi-task Learning. Jun Chen, Deyao Zhu, Xiaoqian Shen, Xiang Li, Zechun Liu, Pengchuan Zhang, Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi, Vikas Chandra, Yunyang Xiong, Mohamed Elhoseiny. arxiv, 2023 [project] [paper] [code] [huggingface demo]
	RSGPT: A Remote Sensing Vision Language Model and Benchmark. Yuan Hu, Jianlong Yuan, Congcong Wen, Xiaonan Lu, Xiang Li. ISPRS JPRS*, 2025 (arXiv 2023) [project] [paper] [code]
	Vision-Language Models in Remote Sensing: Current Progress and Future Trends. Xiang Li, Congcong Wen, Yuan Hu, Zhengpeng Yuan, Xiao Xiang Zhu. IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine (GRSM)*, 2024 [paper]
	RS-CLIP: Zero Shot Remote Sensing Scene Classification via Contrastive Vision-Language Supervision. Xiang Li, Xiang Li, Congcong Wen, Nan Zhou. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation (JAG), 2023 [project] [paper] [code]
	Few-shot Object Detection on Remote Sensing Images. Xiang Li^#, Jingyu Deng^#, Yi Fang. TGRS, 2021 [paper] [code]
	Few-shot Learning of Part-specific Probability Space for 3D Shape Segmentation. Lingjing Wang^#, Xiang Li^#, Yi Fang. CVPR, 2020 [paper] [code]
	Directionally Constrained Fully Convolutional Neural Network For Airborne Lidar Point Cloud Classification. Congcong Wen, Lina Yang, Ling Peng, Xiang Li* ISPRS J, 2020 [paper] [code]

Honors and Awards

IEEE GRSS Early Career Award 2025
Outstanding Reviewer for ICCV 2021.
Postdoc Non-travel Award, NYUAD 2020 & 2021.
National Scholarship, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2018
China Scholarship Council (CSC) scholarship, 2017
Director’s Fund of RADI, 2017
Seagate Scholarship, Wuhan University, 2012
National Scholarship, Wuhan University, 2011

Xiang Li

Selected Publications

MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models.

MiniGPT-v2: Large Language Model as a Unified Interface for Vision-Language Multi-task Learning.

RSGPT: A Remote Sensing Vision Language Model and Benchmark.

Vision-Language Models in Remote Sensing: Current Progress and Future Trends.

RS-CLIP: Zero Shot Remote Sensing Scene Classification via Contrastive Vision-Language Supervision.

Few-shot Object Detection on Remote Sensing Images.

Few-shot Learning of Part-specific Probability Space for 3D Shape Segmentation.

Directionally Constrained Fully Convolutional Neural Network For Airborne Lidar Point Cloud Classification.

Honors and Awards