Xiaolei Huang Homepage

Brief Intro.

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) David L. Payne Dept. of EECS and serves Director of Graduate Studies for the Informatics PhD Program at the MU Institute for Data Science and Informatics. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor in CS at the University of Memphis. I obtained Ph.D. in Information Science (advised by Dr. Michael J. Paul and Prof. Robin Burke) @ University of Colorado Boulder (Go Buffs!). My current research interest is in trustworthy NLP, model robustness, edge computing (model efficiency), with applications in health informatics & LLM for Sciences (agriculture). Email me with your CV and Transcripts if you plan to work with me.

I am looking for two or three PhD students for 2027 Spring/Fall. A student with an MS degree or NLP-related research is preferred. Please submit your application at Mizzou CS or Informatics PhD program. More details here: Openings. GRE is required; Check minimum English requirements before reaching out plz.

Due to potential plagiarism, my lab does not accept the home edition of TOEFL or GRE scores.

See my [CV] (08-10-2026), The reference list is based on request.

One Paid research projects for undergraduate students are available via NSF REU. Please email your CV and unofficial transcripts. US citizen or permanent residents are required.

We are always looking for undergraduate students, who have some machine learning experience or taken my courses.

Top 5 News:

2026 - 10
- I have joined the editorial board of the Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research (Springer Nature) as an Associate Editor.
2026 - 09
- I will serve in an NSF panel.
2026 - 08
- Our paper "AIA^2: Attribute-Agnostic Imbalance Augmentation for Subgroup Robustness" has been accepted by the EMNLP-26 Findings.
2026 - 07
- We have received an NSF award to advance sensing network for soybean breeding and strengthen the US-India 🇺🇲🤝🇮🇳 partnership.
2026 - 06
- I have a presentation of "Scaling AI Education Without Large-Scale Local HPC: Shared Models for Emerging Institutional Capacity" at the NAIRR Pilot Classroom Expansion Conferences: Capacity and Community for Research Emerging Institutions with Large Computing Programs organized by the CRA.
2026 - 04
- We have 3 papers (2 main conference and 1 finding) accepted at the ACL-26!

Old News

2026 - 04
- We have released a reasoning benchmark with scientific evidence and expert annotations for generative-AI and plant sciences.
- We have one paper "Cultivating Multidisciplinary AI Workforce Development on iTiger GPU Cluster: Practices and Challenges" accepted to the ACM PEARC-26 leading by my undergraduate student Mayira.
- We have one journal paper "Leveraging Multimodal Self-Consistency Reasoning in Coding Motivational Interviewing for Alcohol Use Reduction" accepted by the Journal of Military Medicine.
2026 - 03
- Our paper "BLUEmed: Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Debate for Clinical Error Detection" has been accepted by the IEEE ICHI-26. This study is led by our undergraduate students, Thika, Khoa, and Wesley and co-mentored by my student Hanshu.
- I have received a "Special Recognition" certificate from our annual research celebration at the University of Memphis.
- I will serve in NSF panels * 3.
- Our tutorial "Synthetic Biomedical Data Generation Across Modalities" (collaborating with Dr. Haohan Wang at UIUC and Dr. Saghir Alfasly at Mayo Clinics) has been accepted by the IEEE ICHI-26, and our group will focus on textual biomedical data.
- I will give a talk at Ole Miss with the focus on AI for Future Engineering and Education (See this Flyer).
2026 - 01
- Our collaborative study "A Scoping Review of Synthetic Data Generation by Language Models in Biomedical Research and Application: Data Utility and Quality Perspectives" published on Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research is fully available online.
- Our collaborative study "Optimizing Prompting Strategies Improves Large Language Model Classification of Pain- and Fatigue-Related Functional Impact in Childhood Cancer Survivors" with St Jude Children's Research Hospital has been published in Nature Communication Medicine.
2025 - 12
- I have received a "Tigers Ascending to Excellence Award" and served as a guest coach for the college basketball team! Go Tigers! 🐯
2025 - 11
- We have organized and released the university-wide AI initiative for researchers supported by the Center for Emerging Technologies in AI (CERTAIN).
2025 - 08
- We have two papers accepted by the EMNLP-25
  - Attributes as Textual Genes: Leveraging LLMs as Genetic Algorithm Simulators for Conditional Synthetic Data Generation
  - Bhaasha, Bhāṣā, Zaban: A Survey for Low-Resourced Languages in South Asia – Current Stage and Challenges
- Our EiR project has been awarded by NSF. We will develop robust multimodal LLMs and applications for health and business fields.
2025 - 06:
- I have received an NSF CAREER award.
- Our study "Joint Imbalance Adaptation for Radiology Report Generation" (Impact Factor: 5.4) has been published in Journal of Health Informatics Research.
- Our literature review on synthetic data generation is available online, "A Scoping Review of Synthetic Data Generation for Biomedical Research and Applications"
2025 - 05
- We have received an NSF travel grant [Link] to support student researchers to present at the IEEE ICHI-25.
2025 - 04
- My REU student Mayira won the best Undergraduate Presentation award (the iTiger Computing Services for Multidisciplinary Research Communities) in our Annual Research Day.
- I will serve an NSF panel after resuming from a break in February. I will serve on NSF panels (2).
2025 - 03 We have a collaborative study with St Jude Children's Hospital, NLP for cancer survivors.
2025 - 01
- Our paper "Examining and Adapting Time for Multilingual Classification via Mixture of Temporal Experts" has been accepted by NAACL-25, 1st-authored by my PhD student Weisi Liu.
- Our imbalance effects on clinical large language model is accepted by the ICHI-25, which is 1st-authored by an undergraduate (supported by NSF REU).
2024 - 12 My efforts in AI and Cyberinfrastructure has been covered by the Memphis Business Journal.
2024 - 11
- I received a grant from ACRE to extend my research of LLMs for Agricultural Engineering.
- I will serve an NSF panel in 2025.
2024 - 10 We will organize a workshop of Trustworthy LLMs for regional collaborators from both academia and industry.
2024 - 09 I will serve in an NSF panel.
2024 - 08 I am assisting organizing IEEE ICHI 2025, please consider submitting your valuable manuscripts.
2024 - 07 Our paper "Time Matters: Examine Temporal Effects on Biomedical Language Models" has been accepted at AMIA-24.
2024 - 06 Our ICHI-24 paper (Chain-of-Interaction: Enhancing Large Language Models for Psychiatric Behavior Understanding by Dyadic Contexts) won the best paper award!
2024 - 06 I have received an NSF award (LINK).
2024 - 06 Our project has been awarded by NAIRR Pilot Program (NAIRR240165) with GPU and other computational resource allocations.
2024 - 05 I have received a research grant to build multimodal LLM for human-robot interactions with applications in transportation, health, and agriculture.
2024 - 04 I gave a talk at the IIS Cognitive Science Seminar about our recent ICHI-24 work, here is the slides.
2024 - 03
- Our paper "Chain-of-Interaction: Enhancing Large Language Models for Psychiatric Behavior Understanding by Dyadic Contexts" has been accepted at ICHI-24.
- My undergraduate mentees Hema and Precious won the research award in our annual Research Symposium for their imbalance learning project.
- I will serve in NSF panel(s).
- My undergraduate mentee Hema has won Experiential Learning Fellowship for our imbalance learning project.
2023 - 12 I will serve in an NSF panel in 2024.
2023 - 11
- A collaborative work with St Jude Children's Research Hospital, Natural Language Processing with Machine Learning Methods to Analyze Unstructured Patient-Reported Outcomes Derived from Electronic Health Records: A Systematic Review, has been accepted by Artificial Intelligence In Medicine. [LINK]
- I will serve in an NSF panel.
- I have received an internal research grant ($5K) to strengthen AI computing and security services.
- My student Weisi received the Neathery Fellowship, only 1 among newly enrolled graduate students.
- I gave a remote talk at the Emory University.
2023 - 10 I gave an invited talk of "Towards Trustworthy Natural Language Processing for Biomedical Research" at the Frank M. Norfleet Forum for regional biomedical researchers. [LINK]
2023 - 09 I have received an NSF award to acquire a GPU cluster for the whole Mid-South / Delta Region (LINK) aiming to advance regional deep learning research and education.
2023 - 06 I have received an NSF REU supplement. If you are an undergraduate student, feel free to drop me an email.
2023 - 04 Our paper "Token Imbalance Adaptation for Radiology Report Generation" has been accepted by Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL).
2023 - 03 I have received an NSF award (LINK).
2023 - 02 I will serve in an NSF reviewing panel.
2022 - 11 Community of Research Scholars (CoRS) Award to build trustworthy machine learning.
2022 - 08 Our paper "A Gumbel-based Rating Prediction Framework for Imbalanced Recommendation" has been accepted by Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM).
2022 - 06 I have received the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award.
2022 - 05 My student Yuexin Wu got her first paper "Unsupervised Reinforcement Adaptation for Class-Imbalanced Text Classification" accepted at *SEM 2022.
2022 - 04 Our Paper "Easy Adaptation to Mitigate Gender Bias in Multilingual Text Classification" has been accepted by NAACL 2022.
2022 - 04 Our Paper "Learning to Adapt Domain Shifts of Moral Values via Instance Weighting" has been accepted by HyperText 2022.
2022 - 03 Our paper "Enriching Unsupervised User Embedding via Medical Concepts" has been accepted by Conference on Health, Inference, and Learning (CHIL).
2022 - 02 I will serve in an NSF reviewing panel.
2022 - 01 I have received an award from West Cancer Foundation to promote health equity. Thanks!
2022 - 01 Our paper "Twitter and Facebook posts about COVID-19 are less likely to spread misinformation compared to other health topics" has been accepted by PLOS ONE.
2021 - 12 We will organize User-NLP 2022 colocate with WWW-22 online~ Please consider submitting your paper.
2021 - 10 Community of Research Scholars (CoRS) Award from the University of Memphis.
2021 - 09 I have received a research gift from Adobe Research * 4 times. Thanks!
2021 - 02 Paper of "User Factor Adaptation for User Embedding via Multitask Learning" was accepted by Adapt-NLP 2021.
2020 - 11 I have successfully defended my dissertation, Metadata Matters: Adaptation Methods for Robust Document Classification. [Thesis Link]
2020 - 10 I will join University of Memphis, Department of Computer Science as an assistant professor starting in Jan 2021.
2020 - 06 I have won Outstanding Research Assistant Award (AY 19-20) at the University of Colorado Boulder.
2020 - 05 I will join Amazon Lab 126 as a (remote) summer intern.
2020 - 04 We have released a Twitter dataset of COVID-19 with automatically annotated entities (keywords and location). We keep updating the data.
2020 - 02 Paper of "Multilingual Twitter Corpus and Baselines for Evaluating Demographic Bias in Hate Speech Recognition" was accepted by LREC 2020.
2020 - 01 Visiting Johns Hopkins University. Hosted by Prof. Mark Dredze. Hope to have collaborations in health related projects.

Press Coverage

New local supercomputer cluster aims to ‘bridge’ industry, research, The Business Journal, by Cole Schnell, 12-13-2024
Does TikTok push graphic content onto its users?, The Daily Helmsman, by Chloe Brannon, 04-26-2022.
Closing the Spaces in the U.S. Healthcare Gap, The MITRE, by Karina Wright, 10-05-2022.
New study investigates early claims of COVID-19 ‘infodemic’, The Hill, by Brooke Migdon, 01-12-2022.
Credible COVID-19 social media posts more common than misinformation, The GW Hatchet, by Jackson Lanzer, 01-24-2022.
Online Pandemic Fretting Has a Public Health Upside, Medical Daily, by Maureen Salamon, 11-20-2020.

Data Announcement

A sentiment analysis dataset that contains user demographic information (gender and age) that could potentially be used for author-level debiasing and fairness evaluation. Over 1 M documents & 800K user entries.
A COVID-19 Twitter dataset.
- Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3735015
- Documentation: http://twitterdata.covid19dataresources.org/index

Acknowledgement

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