Photo taken by my friend Jiao
5th Year Ph.D. Candidate of Computer Science
University of Southern California
๐ฎ nanx [AT] usc [DOT] edu
Advisors: Prof. Muhao Chen, Prof. Xuezhe Ma
My dearest supporter Nikki (ๅคงๅฎ in Chinese)
Biography
I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at Department of Computer Science of University of Southern California.
My research interests fall in investigating decoding strategies of LLMs to address challenging problems such as degeneration and hallucination. Besides, I study safety alignment of LLMs in defense of jailbreaks, adversarial attacks, and etc.ย
I received my Bachelor's (in 2015) and Master's degree (in 2019) of Computer Science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, advised by Prof. Yanmin Zhu and Prof. Yanyan Shen. I also got a second Master's degree (in 2017) of Computer Science from Technical University of Berlin. I was fortunate to work with Prof. Yan Liu and Prof. Zhenhui Li.
News
[Mar 13th, 2024] Our paper Cognitive Overload was accepted by NAACL 2024
[Jan 18th, 2024] Our paper CEO was accepted by EACL 2024
[Jan 16th, 2024] Our paper AutoDAN was accepted by ICLR 2024
[Dec 10th, 2023] ๐๐๐ฝ Our paper, Look-back Decoding for Open-Ended Text Generation, wins the Outstanding Paper award at EMNLP 2023ย
[Oct 7th, 2023] Three papers accepted by EMNLP 2023
Experience
Tencent AI Lab
Jun. 2022 - Aug. 2022 Bellevue, U.S.A.
Research Intern, Mentors: Dr. Hongming Zhang and Dr. Jianshu Chen
Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Ontology Induction
Amazon
Jun. 2020 - Aug. 2020 Seattle, U.S.A.
Applied Science Intern, Mentors: Dr. Seyi Feyisetan and Dr. Abhinav Aggarwal
Differentially Private Textual Perturbations Using Truncated Gumbel Noise
Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute
Jun. 2016 - Sep. 2017 Berlin, Germany
Software Engineer Intern
Measuring Station Software Development and Maintenance (in C++)
Publications
(* indicates equal contribution)
Natural Language Generation
๐ Outstanding Paper Award
Look-back Decoding for Open-Ended Text Generation ๐ ๐นย
Nan Xu, Chunting Zhou, Asli Celikyilmaz, Xuezhe Ma
EMNLP 2023
Evaluate Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks ๐
Jiao Sun*, Yufei Tian*, Wangchunshu Zhou*, Nan Xu*, Qian Hu, John Frederick Wieting, Xuezhe Ma
EMNLP 2023
Safety and Robustness in NLP
Cognitive Overload: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Overloaded Logical Thinking ๐ย
Nan Xu, Fei Wang, Ben Zhou, Bang Zheng Li, Chaowei Xiao, Muhao Chen
NAACL 2024 Findings
Autodan: Generating stealthy jailbreak prompts on aligned large language models ๐
Xiaogeng Liu, Nan Xu, Muhao Chen, Chaowei Xiao
ICLR 2024
๐ Best Paper Award
Density-Aware Differentially Private Textual Perturbations Using Truncated Gumbel Noise ๐
Nan Xu, Oluwaseyi Feyisetan, Abhinav Aggarwal, Zekun Xu, Nathanael Teissier
FLAIRS 2021
NLP Applications
CEO: Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Ontology Induction ๐ย
Nan Xu, Hongming Zhang, Jianshu Chen
EACL 2024 Findings
Dense Retrieval as Indirect Supervision for Large-space Decision Making ๐ย
Nan Xu, Fei Wang, Mingtao Dong, Muhao Chen
EMNLP 2023 Findings
Does Your Model Classify Entities Reasonably? Diagnosing and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Entity Typing ๐ย
Nan Xu,ย Fei Wang, Bangzheng Li, Mingtao Dong, Muhao Chen
EMNLP 2022
Reinforcement Learning Applications
Treatment Recommendation with Preference-based Reinforcement Learning ๐๐กย
Nan Xu, Nitin Kamra, Yan Liu
ICBK 2021
Toward A Thousand Lights: Decentralized Deep Reinforcement Learning for Large-Scale Traffic Signal Control ๐
Chacha Chen, Hua Wei, Nan Xu, Guanjie Zheng, Ming Yang, Yuanhao Xiong, Kai Xu, Zhenhui Li
AAAI 2020
MetaLight: Value-based Meta-reinforcement Learning for Online Universal Traffic Signal Control ๐
Xinshi Zang, Huaxiu Yao, Guanjie Zheng, Nan Xu, Kai Xu, Zhenhui Li
AAAI 2020
CoLight: Learning Network-level Cooperation for Traffic Signal Control ๐ ๐งโ๐ปย
Hua Wei*, Nan Xu*, Huichu Zhang, Guanjie Zheng, Xinshi Zang, Chacha Chen, Weinan Zhang, Yanmin Zhu, Kai Xu, Zhenhui Liย
CIKM 2019ย
Targeted Knowledge Transfer for Learning Traffic Signal Plans ๐
Nan Xu, Guanjie Zheng, Kai Xu, Yanmin Zhu, Zhenhui Li
PAKDD 2019
Diagnosing Reinforcement Learning for Traffic Signal Control ๐
Guanjie Zheng, Xinshi Zang, Nan Xu, Hua Wei, Zhengyao Yu, Vikash Gayah, Zhenhui Li
Arxiv
Others
A multi-scale time-series dataset with benchmark for machine learning in decarbonized energy grids ๐ ๐งโ๐ป
Xiangtian Zheng*, Nan Xu*,ย Loc Trinh*, Dongqi Wu*, Tong Huang, S Sivaranjani, Yan Liu, Le Xie
Scientific Data 2022
Interpretability and fairness evaluation of deep learning models on MIMIC-IV dataset ๐ย
Chuizheng Meng*, Loc Trinh*, Nan Xu*,ย Yan Liuย
Scientific Reports 2022
Simulating Continuous-time Human Mobility Trajectories ๐ ๐ผ๏ธ
Nan Xu*, Loc Trinh*, Sirisha Rambhatla, Samuel Assefa, Jiahao Chen, Zhen Zeng, Yan Liuย
SimDL@ICLR 2021
A Multi-task Learning Framework for Automatic Early Detection of Alzheimer's ๐ ๐ผ๏ธ
Nan Xu, Yanyan Shen, Yanmin Zhu
DASFAA 2019 (short)
Attention-based Hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network for Phenotype Classification ๐
Nan Xu, Yanyan Shen, Yanmin Zhu
PAKDD 2019ย
Awards
Outstanding Paper Award, EMNLP 2023
Sentosa, Singapore 2023
Best Paper Award, the 34th International FLAIRS Conference
Miami, U.S.A 2021
Annenberg Graduate Fellowship, University of Southern California
Los Angeles, U.S.A 2019-2023
Scholarship of the German Academic Exchange Service, Technical University of Berlin
Berlin, Germany 2015-2016
Academic Excellence Scholarship, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Shanghai, China 2013-2014
Services
PC Member
AAAI (2023)
Conference Reviewer ย ย ย ย ย ย ย
ACL (2023), EMNLP (2023, 2022), EACL (2022), ICML (2022),ย
NeurIPS (2023-2021), ICLR (2024, 2022),ย
AMIA (2020)
Journal Reviewer ย ย ย ย ย ย
TPAMI (2021)