Personal profile
Author IDs
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-4437-0671
Scopus Author ID: 57205687721
Impact
Biography
Prof. XU has obtained his PhD degree at the Northeastern University, and he holds a MSc degree and a BSc degree from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Florida and Sichuan University respectively. His primary research focuses on Trustworthy AI, including formal verification, practical adversarial attacks, and uncertainty quantification. As a Principal Investigator, Prof. Xu has led multiple research projects funded by the U.S. NSF and national laboratories. His work bridges rigorous theoretical guarantees with practical AI robustness solutions, advancing the safety and reliability of AI systems in real-world applications.
Prior to joining us, Prof. XU was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Drexel University from 2021 to 2025. With extensively publication in top-tier venues across machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing; and serving as a program committee member and area chair for leading conferences. In addition, Prof. Xu is a four-time champion of the International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), a recipient of Drexel’s Faculty Research Excellence Award, and a winner of the Best Paper Award at the NeurIPS 2024 GenAI4Health workshop.
Research Interests/Areas
Trustworthy AI, Uncertainty Quantification, Formal Verification, AI in Health, Foundation Models
Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
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SDG 3 Good Health and Well-being
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SDG 4 Quality Education
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SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy
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Collaborations from the last five years
Research output
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Safety Alignment of Large Language Models via Contrasting Safe and Harmful Distributions
Zhang, X. (Co-first Author), Zhao, Z. (Co-first Author), Shi, W., Xu, K., Huang, D. & Hu, X., 2026, Proceedings of the 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. AAAI Press, p. 34827-34835 (Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence; vol. 40, no. 41).Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review
Open Access -
DiffZOO: A Purely Query-Based Black-Box Attack for Red-teaming Text-to-Image Generative Model via Zeroth Order Optimization
Dang, P., Hu, X., Li, D., Zhang, R., Guo, Q. & Xu, K., Apr 2025, NAACL 2025 - Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Conference Findings. ACL Anthology, p. 17-31 (Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Proceedings of the Conference Findings, NAACL).Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review
Open AccessFile2 Link opens in a new tab Citations (Scopus)2 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars) -
DynaCode: A Dynamic Complexity-Aware Code Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Code Generation
Hu, W., Duan, J., Wei, C., Zhang, L., Zhang, Y. & Xu, K., Jul 2025, The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025): Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025. Che, W., Nabende, J., Shutova, E. & Pilehvar, M. T. (eds.). ACL Anthology, p. 21980-21997 (Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics).Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review
Open AccessFile2 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars) -
GUIDELLM: Exploring LLM-Guided Conversation with Applications in Autobiography Interviewing
Duan, J. (Co-first Author), Zhao, X. (Co-first Author), Zhang, Z. (Co-first Author), Ko, E., Boddy, L., Wang, C., Li, T., Rasgon, A., Hong, J., Lee, M. K., Yuan, C., Long, Q., Ding, Y., Chen, T. & Xu, K., Apr 2025, Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Volume 1: Long Papers. ACL Anthology, Vol. 1. p. 5558-5588 (Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Long Papers, NAACL-HLT).Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review
Open AccessFile1 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars) -
LIFT: Automating Symbolic Execution Optimization with Large Language Models for AI Networks
Wang, R., Li, K., Xu, M., Zhang, Y., Xu, K., Liu, C., Xiao, Y. & Cheng, X., Sept 2025, NAIC '25 - Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Networks for AI Computing. Association for Computing Machinery, p. 37-42 (NAIC - Proceedings of the Workshop on Networks for AI Computing).Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review
Open AccessFile2 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars)
Prizes
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Stanford's Top 2% most highly cited scientists 2025
XU, K. (Recipient), Sept 2025
Prize: RGC 64B - Prizes and awards