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])
• Towards 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
• Towards Usable 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

Join the AAAI 2025 Hackathon! We’re excited to announce the AAAI 2025 Hackathon, a premier event showcasing innovation and collaboration in AI. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just getting started, this is your chance to contribute, learn, and network with experts in the field.

👉 Click here for more details and to register!

Don’t miss out—everyone is welcome to participate!

🎖 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

• 2025.01:  🎉 Two papers are selected as Oral Presentation in AAAI 2025, see you in Philadelphia!
• 2025.01:  🎉 I gave a talk at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen.
• 2024.12:  🎉 I gave a talk at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), and Beihang 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!
• 2024.09:  🎉 Our paper “Towards Multi-dimensional Explanation Alignment for Medical Classification” has been accepted at The Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)!
• 2024.09:  🎉 Three papers (2 Main, 1 Findings) have been accepted at the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2024)!
• 2024.07:  🎉 Our paper “SATO: Stable Text-to-Motion Framework” has been accepted at The 32nd ACM Multimedia Conference (ACM MM 2024)!