Hanchen Li

Hanchen Li

lihanc2002 [at] gmail [at] (Skipping the rest)

About Me

I am a 1st year PhD student at UCB Sky Lab advised by Prof. Ion Stoica and Prof. Joseph Gonzalez. My current research focus lies broadly in agent infra (inference, context engineering automation, benchmark…) Previously, I graduated from University of Chicago with BS in Math and CS (both honors), mainly working with Prof. Junchen Jiang.

I write about technology, business, and society at my blog site. The best way to follow me is on Twitter or Linkedin!

In previous life, I was the first employee of Tensormesh (creator of LMCache), where I led Product and Growth in the beginning. I was one of the very first people to optimize KV cache reuse beyond GPU HBM for LLMs (The Cache papers).

I am open to collaborations and working with undergraduate students with excellence and tenacity. Please checkout the collaborations page if you are interested!

Selected Publications

* indicates equivalent contribution

  • Continuum: Efficient and Robust Multi-Turn LLM Agent Scheduling with KV Cache Time-to-Live
    Hanchen Li, Qiuyang Mang, Runyuan He, Qizheng Zhang, Huanzhi Mao, Xiaokun Chen, Alvin Cheung, Joseph Gonzalez, Ion Stoica
    Arxiv [Paper] [Preview Code]

  • Agentic Context Engineering: Evolving Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models
    Qizheng Zhang, Changran Hu, Shubhangi Upasani, Boyuan Ma, Fenglu Hong, Vamsidhar Kamanuru, Jay Rainton, Chen Wu, Mengmeng Ji, Hanchen Li, Urmish Thakker, James Zou, Kunle Olukotun
    ICLR 2026 [Paper] [Repo]

  • CacheBlend: Fast Large Language Model Serving for RAG with Cached Knowledge Fusion
    Jiayi Yao, Hanchen Li, Yuhan Liu, Siddhant Ray, Yihua Cheng, Qizheng Zhang, Kuntai Du, Shan Lu, Junchen Jiang
    EuroSys 2025 (Best Paper Award!) [Paper]

  • CacheGen: Fast Context Loading for Language Model Applications
    Yuhan Liu, Hanchen Li, Kuntai Du, Jiayi Yao, Yihua Cheng, Yuyang Huang, Shan Lu, Michael Maire, Henry Hoffmann, Ari Holtzman, Ganesh Ananthanarayanan, Junchen Jiang
    SIGCOMM 2024 [Paper] [Talk] [Slides]

  • Towards More Economical Context-Augmented LLM Generation by Reusing Stored KV Cache
    Hanchen Li*, Yuhan Liu*, Yihua Cheng, Kuntai Du, Junchen Jiang
    NSDI Poster 2024 [Link]

All Publications (check Google Scholar)

Life

  • My name in Chinese is 李翰宸 and I grew up in Nanjing, Jiangsu.
  • I play soccer, basketball, tennis, and lift. I enjoyed 掼蛋(Guan Dan, a popular card game in JiangsuChina) with friends but now I got back to reading.