• I am a second-year MPhil student in the Department of Artificial Intelligence at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, supervised by Prof. Hao LIU and Prof. Hui Xiong. Prior to my MPhil, I received a Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University.

• My research interests are focused on foundation models. Specifically, my current work revolves around the development of reliable, trustworthy Large Models (LLMs, LVMs) and their applications in real-world scenarios (e.g., smart cities).

• I am seeking a Ph.D. opportunity starting in Fall 2025. If my research interests align with yours and you are open to considering me as a potential advisee, please feel free to contact me via WeChat at Bill2998 or email at [email protected]. I am eager to explore potential collaborations and opportunities with you!

• I am also searching for a research internship for the winter, spring, or summer of 2025. I am available from February to August 2025 and am particularly interested in projects related to Trustworthy AI and Foundation Models. I would greatly appreciate any information or opportunities you could share. Feel free to reach out to me.

Acknowledgment

• I used to suffer from severe lumbar and heart disease from 2020 to 2022. Despite facing severe health issues, I persevered with the support of my family, friends, and supervisors, including Prof. Yong Li and Prof. Minghua Chen, as well as Dr. Junbo Zhang, Dr. Jie Feng, Dr. Yuanwei Fang, and Kai Zhao. I am deeply grateful for their help.
• After recovery, I am now determined and motivated to move on and make the best of each day.

Let’s Connect!

• Feel free to reach out—whether it’s a quick question or something more in-depth! I’m always open to connecting and typically respond within 24 hours unless I’m on a tight deadline. You can reach me by email or on [Twitter/WeChat/LinkedIn—see the icons on the left]. If you’d like to schedule a quick call, you can simply click here to book a time on my Calendly. Looking forward to connecting!

Genius only means hard-working all one's life. (Mendeleev)

🔥 News

• 2024.11: 🎉 Our paper, LLMLight, was accepted by KDD 2025! This work is the result of countless efforts and fruitful collaboration, and I want to extend my heartfelt congratulations to my good friend Siqi for his outstanding contributions!!
• 2024.11: 🎉 I received the research internship offer from Shanghai AI Lab. I am excited to work with Dr. Jing Shao and her team. I am grateful for the opportunity provided by Dr. Shao and the support from my supervisors, Prof. Hao Liu and Prof. Hui Xiong.
• 2024.09: 🎉🎉 Our paper has been accepted at NeurIPS 2024! More details, including the project homepage and leaderboard, are coming soon.
• 2024.09: 🎉 I’m excited to announce that I will be serving as a reviewer for ICLR 2025. I look forward to contributing to the community and learning from the latest research. I am committed to adhering to all relevant ethical guidelines and will put forth my best effort to ensure a thorough and fair review process.
• 2024.08: I’m participating in the KDD 2024 conference in Barcelona. I’m looking forward to meeting you there! If you’re interested in my research, please feel free to contact me via Whova or WeChat (Bill2998).
• 2024.07: 🎉 I start my summer internship at the University of Chicago, collaborating with Prof. Bo Li and Prof. Hao Liu on the project related to LLM Agents. I am excited to learn from and contribute to this experience. I am grateful for the opportunity provided by Prof. Bo Li and the support from Prof. Hao Liu!
• 2024.05: Our paper was accepted by KDD 2024! It is a great honor to present our work at the conference. See you in Barcelona!
• 2024.01: We have conducted a comprehensive review of Urban Foundation Models, offering insightful perspectives and findings. Access our detailed paper and repository HERE.
• 2023.12: Our latest work applies Large Language Models (LLMs) to Traffic Signal Control (TSC) tasks. Discover our paper, code, and demo HERE. We are currently preparing further studies for submission to KDD 2024.

• 2023.08: 🎉 I accepted the MPhil offer from HKUST, and it was my pleasure to join USAIL group.
• 2022.12: 🎉🎉 I recovered from severe Spinal Disc Herniation thanks to rehabilitation training and swimming!

📖 Educational and Professional Background

• 2024.07 - 2024.12 (Anticipated), The University of Chicago
  Research Intern, Department of Computer Science
  Supervisor: Prof. Bo Li
• 2025 (Anticipated), The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
  Master of Philosophy, Department of Artificial Intelligence
  Supervisor: Prof. Hao Liu Co-supervisor: Prof. Hui Xiong
• 2022, Tsinghua University
  Bachelor, Department of Electronic Engineering
  Supervisor: Prof. Yong Li
• 2019.07 - 2019.10, Pennsylvania State University
  Undergraduate Visiting Researcher, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science

📝 Projects and Publications

^* indicates equal contribution, ^† indicates corresponding author.

• Arxiv 2024 JAILJUDGE: A Comprehensive Jailbreak Judge Benchmark with Multi-Agent Enhanced Explanation Evaluation Framework
  [Github] , Project Page
  Fan Liu, Yue Feng^†, Zhao Xu, Lixin Su, Xinyu Ma, Dawei Yin, Hao Liu^†
  

NeurIPS 2024

• “Bag of Tricks: Benchmarking of Jailbreak Attacks on LLMs”
  [Github] [🔥Media Coverage (8k+ reads)] [1], [2], [3]
  Zhao Xu, Fan Liu, Hao Liu^†
  Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Vancouver, Canada, 2024

Arxiv 2024

• “Adversarial Tuning: Defending Against Jailbreak Attacks for LLMs”
  [Github] (Coming soon)
  Fan Liu, Zhao Xu, Hao Liu^†
  arXiv:2406.06622 [cs.CL]

KDD 2024

• “Towards Urban General Intelligence: A Review and Outlook of Urban Foundation Models”
  [Github] , [Media Coverage (2k+ reads)]
  Weijia Zhang, Jindong Han, Zhao Xu, Hang Ni, Hao Liu^†, Hui Xiong
  ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Barcelona, Spain, 2024

Arxiv 2024

• “Large Language Models as Traffic Signal Control Agents: Capacity and Opportunity”
  [Github] , [Project Page], [Demo], [🔥Media Coverage (14k+ reads)]
  Siqi Lai, Zhao Xu, Weijia Zhang, Hao Liu^†, Hui Xiong
  ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), Toronto, Canada, 2025

• TMC 2020 “DeepMM: Deep learning based map matching with data augmentation” (Extension of SIGSPATIAL 2019 Paper)
  Jie Feng, Yong Li^†, Kai Zhao, Zhao Xu, Tong Xia, Lin Chen, Depeng Jin
  IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (CCF A)

• SIGSPATIAL 2019 “DeepMM: Deep learning based map matching with data augmentation”
  Kai Zhao, Jie Feng, Zhao Xu, Tong Xia, Lin Chen, Funing Sun, Diansheng Guo, Depeng Jin, Yong Li^†
  Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (CORE Rank A, Acceptance Rate: 21%)

🎖 Honors and Awards

• Travel Grant for KDD 2024, HKUST
• Postgraduate Scholarship, HKUST
• Scholarship for Outstanding Freshman, Tsinghua University (Top 1%, 30 out of 3000)
• Outstanding Student in Work-Study Assistance, Tsinghua University

🍀 Services

• Reviewer: COLING’25, ICLR’25, SafeGenAi@NeurIPS’24, LLMAgents@ICLR’24
• Secondary Reviewer: NeurIPS’24, KDD’24, NeurIPS’23
• Volunteer: KDD2024

💻 Work Experience

• 2024.12 - 2025.08 (Anticipated), Research Intern, OpenTrustLab, Shanghai AI Lab .
• 2024.07 - Present, Research Assistant, Department of Computer Science, The University of Chicago .
• 2023.05 - Present, Research Assistant, AI Thrust, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology .
• 2021.01 - 2021.05, Research Intern, Computing Technology Lab, Alibaba DAMO Academy .
• 2018.05 - 2020.10, Research Assistant, Future Intelligence laB (FIB), Tsinghua University .
• 2019.07 - 2019.10, Research Assistant, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science .

🎤 Invited Talks

• 2024.11: I’ll be presenting our latest work on benchmarking LLM jailbreaks at the AI Time Forum (in Chinese). If you’re interested in the topic, please join us at 3:30 PM on November 13. I will also serve as session chair for the afternoon session on November 19.

🎁 Quick Facts

Q: What motivates me to pursue research?

• Seeking novel and engaging challenges, rather than settling for a monotonous routine.
• Past experiences with disease, driving my desire to make impactful contributions to society.
• Personal fulfillment in pursuing my own research interests.

Q: What type of research am I interested in?

• Honest, intriguing, and impactful studies.
• Research with practical, real-world applications.
• Access to ample resources, including computational tools and expert collaborations.

Q: What are my expectations for PhD life?

• A productive, smart, and hard-working, yet joyful experience.
• Supportive mentoring with patience and constructive feedback.
• Annual research internships at top-tier industry labs to connect research with real-world needs.
• Access to adequate GPUs, to facilitate research.
• Contribute and attend to top-tier conferences annually, striving to publish my works and broaden professional network.

As a proud member of the data mining community and an enthusiastic data miner, here are some interesting data points about me:

• Most GPUs used for a single project: 82 A100-80G GPUs
• Largest dataset analyzed: 10 TB
• Collaboration experience with other researchers: 6
• Number of top-tier research conferences attended: 2
• Working timetable: Currently, 7 days a week, 10-14 hours per day; Ideally 6 days a week, 10-14 hours per day. Life is worth taking seriously too, especially after overcoming illness.

💬 To Prospective Advisor

Last update: November 17, 2024