Hi, I am Lijie Hu! I am an Assistant Professor in the Machine Learning Department at Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI). I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in 2025, where I had the privilege of being advised by Prof. Di Wang, who leads the PRADA Lab (Provable Responsible AI and Data Analytics Lab). Prior to that, I obtained my Master’s degree in Mathematics from Renmin University of China.

My research interests are Explainable AI. 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 helps realize these goals by making progress in the following four directions:

• Theoretical Foundations of Usable XAI: stability([ICML’24 Spotlight],[ICLR’24],[AAAI’23 Oral],[TMLR]), controllability([ICML’25,a],[ArXiv2]), consistency([ICCV’25],[NeurIPS’24],[EMNLP’24,a])
• Useful XAI in Large Models: enhance safety([AAAI’25 Oral,a],[ICML’25,b],[NAACL’25],[AAAI’25 Oral,b],[COLM’24,a],[COLM’24,b],[EMNLP’24 Oral,b]), boost model performance([ArXiv]), steer model behavior([ArXiv])
• System for XAI: acceleration
• XAI for Science: healthcare([ICLR’24],[NeurIPS’24],[ECML-PKDD’25]), autonomous driving([ICRA’25]), material science, marine science

Openings

My lab is seeking several highly motivated PhD students/Postdocs/RAs/Visiting PhD students. PhD positions begin in Fall 2026. Postdocs/RAs/Visiting PhD students can start anytime. If you are interested in working with me, please email your CV, academic transcript, and a brief outline of your research plan. We enthusiastically welcome Ph.D. students committed to long-term, in-depth research. Prior publications are not required.

🎖 Honors and Awards

• AISTATS 2023 Top Reviewer.
• CEMSE Dean’s List Award, KAUST, 2022, 2024, 2025.
• Invited to The ACM Transactions on Database Systems special issue on Best of PODS 2022.

🔥 News

• 2025.10:  🎉 I’m happy to serve as Area Chair/Action Editor of ARR (ACL Rolling Review)!
• 2025.09:  🎉 Our paper “EAP-GP: Mitigating Saturation Effect in Gradient-based Automated Circuit Identification” has been accepted at NeurIPS 2025!
• 2025.08:  🎉 I’m happy to serve as Area Chair of ICLR 2026!
• 2025.08:  🎉 I’m happy to serve as Area Chair of ACML 2025!
• 2025.08:  🎉 Two papers have been accepted at Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025)!
• 2025.07:  🎉 Two papers have been accepted at 2025 ACM Multimedia!
• 2025.06:  🎉 Our paper “Semi-supervised Concept Bottleneck Models” has been accepted at IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2025)!
• 2025.05:  🎉 Our paper “Stable Vision Concept Transformers for Medical Diagnosis” has been accepted at ECML-PKDD 2025!
• 2025.05:  🎉 Four papers have been accepted at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)!
• 2025.05:  🎉 I’m happy to serve as Virtual Session Chair of NAACL 2025.
• 2025.05:  🎉 Two papers, “Editable Concept Bottleneck Models” and “Locate-then-edit for Multi-hop Factual Recall under Knowledge Editing” have been accepted at ICML 2025!