Hello! I am Lijie Hu, a final-year Ph.D. Candidate 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 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]), controllability([ArXiv1],[ArXiv2]), consistency([NeurIPS’24],[EMNLP’24,a])
• Useful XAI in Large Models: enhance safety([AAAI’25 Oral,a],[ArXiv3],[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]), 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]).

Openings

I will be joining the Machine Learning Department at MBZUAI as a Tenure-track Assistant Professor in August 2025. I am seeking several highly motivated PhD students/Postdocs/RAs/Visiting PhD students. PhD positions begin in Fall 2025 or 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.

🎖 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

• 2025.04:  🎉 Our paper “Faithful Interpretation for Graph Neural Networks” has been accepted at TMLR!
• 2025.01:  🎉 One paper has been accepted at ICRA 2025, IEEE TKDE, NAACL 2025, and ICLR 2025!
• 2025.01:  🎉 Two papers are selected as Oral Presentation in AAAI 2025, see you in Philadelphia!
• 2024.12:  🎉 We’re excited to announce the AAAI 2025 Hackathon!
• 2024.12:  🎉 Two papers have been accepted at AAAI 2025!
• 2024.10:  🎉 Two papers are selected as Oral Presentation in EMNLP 2024, see you in Miami!