I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Arizona (UA). Before joining UA, I was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the EECS department of UC Berkeley and Berkeley AI Research. I obtained my Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University. I earned my B.E. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2017. 

My primary research aims to develop mathematical understandings of the efficiency and robustness of deep neural network models to make deep learning usable in real world tasks, with applications spanning from computer vision, generative model, and natural language processing.  Specifically, I'm interested in the following topics:

• AI efficiency: Efficient deployment and adaptation of neural network/foundational models.

• AI security: Identifying and resolving issues on AI performance, robustness, fairness, interpretability, trustworthiness, etc.

• AI system and SW/HW codesign: Design AI algorithms that are suitable for system and hardware deployments, design system and hardware to accelerate AI deployments.

• AI application and optimization: design and optimize AI-based models and systems for emerging applications.

I am also broadly interested in deep learning privacy, interpretability, federated learning, and software-hardware co-design. 

I'm actively recruiting self-motivated PhD students to join my group. Please email me your research statement, CV, and transcripts with [PHD application] in the subject. Details can be found here

News

I'm planing to attend the following conferences, please say hi if you see me :D

• ACM MM, 10/27/2024 - 11/02/2024, Melbourne, Austrlia

• NeurIPS, 12/10/2024 - 12/14/2024, Vancouver, BC

One paper on sharpness-diversity tradeoff in ensembles is accepted at NeurIPS 2024.

One paper on vision-language active learning is accepted at ACM MM 2024.

One paper on efficient ensemble for OOD detection is accepted at ICML 2024.

Educational background

PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke University, 08/2017 to 05/2022

• Dissertation: Towards Efficient and Robust Deep Neural Network Models

• Advisor: Prof. Hai Li and Prof. Yiran Chen

BE, Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, 09/2013 to 07/2017

• Diploma Thesis: On-chip Trainable Fully Connected Neural Network Accelerator Architecture (Outstanding Diploma Thesis of Tsinghua University, in Chinese)

• Advisor: Prof. Yongpan Liu

High School, Experimental Class for Gifted Children, Beijing No.8 Middle School, 09/2009 to 06/2013

Professional experience

Assistant Professor, ECE, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, 08/2024 to now

Visiting Scholar, TetraMem, Fremont, CA, 05/2024 - 08/2024

Postdoctoral Scholar, EECS/BAIR, University of California, Berkeley, 06/2022 - 05/2024

• Advisor: Prof. Kurt Keutzer 

Research Intern, NVIDIA Corporation, remote, 02/2021 - 09/2021

• Supervised by Dr. Danny Yin, Dr. Pavlo Molchanov and Dr. Jan Kautz.

Research Intern, Microsoft Corporation, Redmond WA, 05/2018 - 08/2018

• Supervised by Dr. Wenhan Wang and Dr. Yuxiong He

Awards

• 2021 WAIC Yunfan Award, Shanghai, 07/2021

• 2022 Duke ECE Outstanding Service Award, Duke University, 05/2022

• CVPR 2023 Outstanding Reviewer Award, 06/2023

• NeurIPS 2021 Outstanding Reviewer Award, 10/2021

• IEEE/ACM MICRO 2021 Best Paper Award, 2021

• SIGKDD 2020 Best Student Paper Award, 2020

• Outstanding Diploma Thesis, Tsinghua University, 06/2017

Academic Services

I have served as the Area Chair or equvalent for the following conferences:

• IEEE CAI 2024, CVPR 2025

I have served as the reviewer for the following conferences and journals

• NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, MLSys, CVPR, ICCV, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, DAC

• IEEE TPAMI, IEEE TNNLS, TMLR, ACM TACO, ACM JETC, IEEE Access

Teaching Experience

• Instructor of ECE 369A Fundamentals of Computer Organization (Fall 2024), the University of Arizona

• Leading teaching assistant of ECE 590 / ECE 661 Computer Engineering Machine Learning and Deep Neural Nets (Fall 2019, Fall 2020 & Fall 2021), Duke University

• Teaching assistant of ECE 681 Pattern Classification and Recognition (Spring 2019), Duke University

• Teaching assistant of ECE 550D Fundamentals of Computer Systems and Engineering (Fall 2018), Duke University