I am an incoming Assistant Professor at the ECE department of the National University of Singapore, after spending one year at Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School. Previously, I was a postdoctoral fellow advised by Dr. Atlas Wang in the Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML), affiliated with the UT AI Health Lab and the Good System Challenge, and obtained my Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Michigan State University with Dr. Jiayu Zhou.
I was recognized as one of the MLSys Rising Stars in 2024 and received a Best Paper Nomination at VLDB 2024. My work was covered by Nature News, The White House, WIRED, Forbes, and FORTUNE.
I lead the Cognitive Science & Trustworthy AI (CoSTA@NUS) Lab exploring the frontier where human minds meet machine intelligence. Openings are available in terms of RA/internship students.
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01/2026
One paper (Training-Free Robot Planning) is accepted to ICRA 2026.
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12/2025
I will travel to NeurIPS for co-organizing the GenAI4Health workshop and give a talk about LLM Brain Rot at the LockLLM workshop.
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10/2025
New paper covered by Nature News, WIRED, Forbes, Fortue and etc.: LLMs can get Brain Rot just like human after browsing enormous brainless social media.
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08/2025
I will join NUS ECE as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor from July, 2026, after spending one year at Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School.
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07/2025
Three papers (robust safety, reasoning and alignment) are accepted to COLM 2025. One paper (madical hallucination) is accepted to EMNLP 2025.
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07/2025
I will server as Area Chair at NeurIPS 2025, and co-organize the 2nd GenAI4Health@NeurIPS and the 3rd FedKDD workshops.
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11/2024
Our research on engaging chatbot based on A-CONECT is supported by the NAIRR Pilot Program!
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08/2024
LLM-PBE benchmark [VLDB24] is selected as the best paper finalist, which is covered by UT ECE News and is used for our NeurIPS 2024 LLM Privacy Challenge!
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07/2024
Co-organize the GenAI4Health workshop and LLM and Agent Safety Competition at NeurIPS 2024.
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07/2024
Our GenAI for Dementia Health project (A-CONECT) is supported by the OpenAI’s Researcher Access Program!
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07/2024
DP-OPT [ICLR24] (private prompt tuning) is selected as Spotlight.
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05/2024
I am selected as MLSys Rising Stars for my work in health and trustworthy ML, covered by UT ECE News.
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03/2024
Invited talk on GenAI Privacy [SaTML24] at UT Good System Symposium.
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03/2023
Our ILLIDAN Lab team wins the 3rd place in the U.S. PETs prize challenge, covered by The White House, and MSU Office of Research and Innovation.
- Best Paper Finalist, VLDB 2024
- ML and Systems Rising Stars, ML Commons, 2024
- Gold Reviewer, ICML, 2026
- Top Area Chair, NeurIPS, 2025
- Top Reviewer, NeurIPS, 2023
- Research Enhancement Award, MSU, 2023
- The 3rd place in the U.S. PETs prize challenge, 2023
- Dissertation Completion Fellowship, MSU, 2023
- Carl V. Page Memorial Graduate Fellowship, MSU, 2021
- Developing Engaging AI Chatbots to Enhance Senior Well-being, NAIRR Pilot Program (NAIRR240321), 2024-2025.
- Designing AI-based Conversational Chatbot for Early Dementia Intervention (A-CONECT), OpenAI Researcher Access Program, 2024-2025.
- GoodSystem Challenge, 2024-2025.
- IFML Postdoctoral Fellowship for my research in trustworthy LLMs, 2023-2024.
- Responsible AI
- Healthcare
- Privacy
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PhD in CSE, 2023
Michigan State University (Advisor: Jiayu Zhou)
Committee: Anil K. Jain, Sijia Liu, Atlas Wang, Jiayu Zhou
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MSc in Computer Science, 2018
University of Science and Technology of China
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BSc in Physics, minor in CS., 2015
University of Science and Technology of China
Experiences
Appointments
- Assistant Professor, NUS ECE, 2026-
- Research Fellow with Dr. Hiroko H. Dodge, Massachusetts General Hospital & Harvard Medical School, 2025-2026.
- Postdoctoral Fellow with Dr. Zhangyang Wang, VITA group@UT Austin, IFML and WNCG, 2023-2025
- Research Intern with Dr. Lingjuan Lyu, Sony AI, 2022
Media Coverage
- LLM Can Get “Brain Rot”, Nature News, WIRED, Forbes, FORTUNE
- Texas ECE Student and Postdoc Named MLCommons Rising Stars, UT Austin ECE News, 2024
- At Summit for Democracy, the United States and the United Kingdom Announce Winners of Challenge to Drive Innovation in Privacy-enhancing Technologies That Reinforce Democratic Values, The White House, 2023
- Privacy-enhancing Research Earns International Attention, MSU Engineering News, 2023
- Privacy-Enhancing Research Earns International Attention, MSU Office Of Research And Innovation, 2023
Invited Talks & Guest Lectures
- ‘Brain Rot in LLMs: When Benign Data Degrades Intelligence?’ @ LockLLM Workshop at NeurIPS 2025, Nov 2025.
- ‘GenAI-Based Chatbot for Early Dementia Intervention’ @ Rising Star Symposium Series, IEEE TCCN Special Interest Group for AI and Machine Learning in Security, September, 2024: [link]
- ‘Building Conversational AI for Affordable and Accessible Early Dementia Intervention’ @ AI Health Course, The School of Information, UT Austin, April, 2024: [paper]
- ‘Shake to Leak: Amplifying the Generative Privacy Risk through Fine-Tuning’ @ Good Systems Symposium: Shaping the Future of Ethical AI, UT Austin, March, 2024: [paper]
- ‘Foundation Models Meet Data Privacy: Risks and Countermeasures’ @ Trustworthy Machine Learning Course, Virginia Tech, Nov, 2023
- ‘Economizing Mild-Cognitive-Impairment Research: Developing a Digital Twin Chatbot from Patient Conversations’ @ BABUΕ KA FORUM, Nov, 2023: [link]
- ‘Backdoor Meets Data-Free Learning’ @ Hong Kong Baptist University, Sep, 2023: [slides]
- ‘MECTA: Memory-Economic Continual Test-Time Model Adaptation’ @ Computer Vision Talks, March, 2023: [slides] [video]
- ‘Split-Mix Federated Learning for Model Customization’ @ TrustML Young Scientist Seminars, July, 2022: [link] [video]
- ‘Federated Adversarial Debiasing for Fair and Transferable Representations’, @ CSE Graduate Seminar, Michigan State University, October, 2021: [slides]
- ‘Dynamic Policies on Differential Private Learning’ @ VITA Seminars, UT Austin, Sep, 2020: [slides]
Services
- Organizers: GenAI4Health@NeurIPS 2024-2025 (Lead Chair), The Competition for LLM and Agent Safety 2024, The NeurIPS 2024 LLM Privacy Challenge, FL4Data-Mining Workshop@KDD 2023 (Lead Chair), FedKDD Workshop 2024-2025
- Area Chair: NeurIPS (Top AC, 2025), ICPR
- Action Editor: TMLR
- External Reviewer: NeurIPS (Top Reviewer 2023), ICML (Gold Reviewer 2026), ICLR, KDD, ECML-PKDD, AISTATS, WSDM, AISTATS, AAAI, IJCAI, NeuroComputing, TKDD, TKDE, JAIR, TDSC, ACM Health
- Volunteer: KDD
Teaching
- Mentor@VRT-CHAT: Designing Reminiscence-Therapy Chatbots with Culturally-Sensitive Visual Stimulation for Mental Health, RAI4Ukraine Program, Center for Responsible AI at NYU, 2024
- Mentor@A-CONECT: Designing AI-based Conversational Chatbot for Early Dementia Intervention, Directed Reading Program (DiRP), UT Austin, 2024
- Mentor@Directed Reading Program (DiRP) on Trustworthy LLM, UT Austin, 2023
- Teaching Assistant@CSE 847: Machine Learning, MSU, 2021
- Teaching Assistant@CSE 404: Introduction to Machine Learning, MSU, 2020