Hello! I am Lijie Hu, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) since Spring 2021, and I am very fortunate to be advised by Prof. Di Wang in PRADA Lab (Provable Responsible AI and Data Analytics Lab). Before that, I received my Master’s degree in Mathematics from Renmin University of China.

My research interests are Explainable AI and Privacy-preserving ML. Specifically, my research goals are to develop Usable XAI-as-a-Service systems (Usable XAI) and Useful Explainable AI toolkits (Useful XAI). Here, usable refers to providing a service for model understanding characterized by faithfulness. Useful means the toolkit can serve as a guide for boosting performance and enhancing the trustworthiness of deep learning models. My research has helped to realize these goals by making progress in the following three directions:

• Theoretical Foundations of Usable XAI: stability([ICML’24 Spotlight],[ICLR’24],[AAAI’23 Oral]), controllability([ArXiv1],[ArXiv2]), consistency([NeurIPS’24],[EMNLP’24,a])
• Useful XAI in Large Models: cognitive science, hallucination([COLM’24,a],[AAAI’25 Oral,a],[ArXiv3]), bias([AAAI’25 Oral,b],[COLM’24,b]), jailbreaking, privacy([EMNLP’24 Oral,b]), copyright
• XAI for Science: healthcare([ICLR’24],[NeurIPS’24]), traffic, material science, marine science

For privacy-preserving machine learning, I mainly focused on private statistical estimation([JMLR,a],[JMLR,b],[ECAI’23],[AISTATS’23],[TKDE],[PODS’22],[ALT’22]) and its application to natural language models([EMNLP’24 Oral,c],[EACL’24]).

I actively seek opportunities in the 2024-2025 job market and would be pleased to connect with those interested in my work. Please feel free to reach out! My CV and Research Statement

🎖 Honors and Awards

• ICLR 2024 Travel Award.
• AISTATS 2023 Top Reviewer.
• AAAI 2023 Travel Award.
• CEMSE Dean’s List Award, KAUST, 2022, 2024.
• Invited to The ACM Transactions on Database Systems special issue on Best of PODS 2022.
• Beijing Honored Graduates (Top 5%), 2017.
• Merit Student of Beijing (Top 1%), 2016.
• China National Scholarship (Top 2‰), 2014, 2015.

🔥 News

• I will give a talk at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Concordia University, the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) at York University, School of Computing Science at Simon Fraser University, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, and INSAIT(Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology) in March!
• 2025.02:  🎉 I gave a talk at the Department of Data Science, New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).
• 2025.02:  🎉 I gave a talk at the Machine Learning Research Department, MBZUAI, Abu Dhabi.
• 2025.02:  🎉 I gave a talk at the Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Canada.
• 2025.01:  🎉 Our paper “Drive: Dependable robust interpretable visionary ensemble framework in autonomous driving” has been accepted at ICRA 2025!
• 2025.01:  🎉 Our paper “Towards Stable and Explainable Attention Mechanisms” has been accepted at IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)!
• 2025.01:  🎉 Our paper “Mechanistic Unveiling of Transformer Circuits: Self-Influence as a Key to Model Reasoning” has been accepted at Findings of the 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2025 Findings)!
• 2025.01:  🎉 Our paper “Backdooring Vision-Language Models with Out-Of-Distribution Data” has been accepted at The 13th International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2025)!
• 2025.01:  🎉 Two papers are selected as Oral Presentation in AAAI 2025, see you in Philadelphia!
• 2025.01:  🎉 I gave a talk at the School of Data Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
• 2025.12:  🎉 I gave a talk at Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing High-tech Innovation Center, Beihang University.
• 2025.12:  🎉 I gave a talk at the School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University.
• 2025.12:  🎉 I gave a talk at the Department of Intelligence, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen.
• 2024.12:  🎉 I gave a talk at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
• 2024.12:  🎉 We’re excited to announce the AAAI 2025 Hackathon!
• 2024.12:  🎉 Two papers have been accepted at the Thirty-Ninth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2025)!
• 2024.10:  🎉 Two papers are selected as Oral Presentation in EMNLP 2024, see you in Miami!