Biography:

I am currently a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, working with Prof. Andreas Vlachos about multimodal fact-checking. I obtained my PhD degree at Singapore Management University, supervised by Prof. Jing Jiang. I obtained my bachelor degree in University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Honor College, majoring computer science. 

Research Interests:

• Multimodal Understanding: Improving compositional and knowledge-intensive multimodal understanding of foundation models in vision-language applications, such as meme comprehension, visual question answering, multimodal fact-checking.

• AI Safety: Enhancing robustness of AI models towards uncertain scenarios, mitigating the bias of AI models and improving the trustworthiness of AI models.

• AI for Social Good: applying AI models to address social challenges.

Experience:

• Postdoc at the University of Cambridge, supervised by Prof. Andreas Vlachos

• Internship in I2R, A*STAR, supervised by Nancy F. Chen and Zhengyuan Liu

• Collaboration with Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Assistant Professor, Singapore University of Technology and Design

Other Experience:

• The organizer of the seventh FEVER workshop (held in EMNLP 2024) and the eighth FEVER workshop (held in ACL 2025).

• First prize winner in the Smart City Challenge in the 16th ACM international WSDM conference (WSDM), 2023

  • Online misinformation detection in live streaming videos. Rui Cao.

• Reviewer for ARR rolling review, WWW 2024/2025, COLING 2023, EMNLP 2023, ACM MM 2023/2024/2025, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing, Computational Linguistics.

Education:

• Ph.D,  School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University  (SMU) Aug 2020 -- June 2024

• Bachelor of  Computer Science, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC), Honor College     Sep 2016 -- July 2020

• Exchange Student in School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) Feb 2018 -- June 2018

Talks:

• Understanding (Dark) Humour with Internet Meme Analysis. International World Wide Web Conference 2024 (WWW 2024)

• Perils and Promises of Automated Hate Speech Detection. The 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Network Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2020) 

Publications: [Google Scholar]:

Weixing Wang*, Zifeng Ding*, Jingdong Gu, Rui Cao, Gerard de Melo, Christoph Meinel , Haojin Yang. Arxiv, 2025.

Resolving Conflicting Evidence in Automated Fact-Checking: A Study on Retrieval-Augmented LLMs

Ziyu Ge, Yuhao Wu, Daniel Wai Kit, Roy Ka‑Wei Lee, Rui Cao. International joint conference on artificial intelligence (IJCAI), AI for Social Good, 2025

Siya Qi, Rui Cao, Yulan He, Zheng Yuan. The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Pro-Cap: Leveraging a Frozen Vision-Language Model for Hateful Meme Detection

Rui Cao, Ming Shan Hee, Adriel Kuek, Wen-Haw Chong, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Jing Jiang. Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2023), 5244-5252

MATK: The Meme Analytical Tool Kit

Ming Shan Hee, Aditi Kumaresan, Nguyen Khoi Hoang, Nirmalendu Prakash, Rui Cao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee. Proceedings of the 31st ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2023), 9689-9692

HateGAN: Adversarial Generative-Based Data Augmentation for Hate Speech Detection

Rui Cao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee. Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2020), 6327–6338

DeepHate: Hate Speech Detection via Multi-Faceted Text Representations

Rui Cao, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Tuan-Anh Hoang. Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Web Science (WebScience 2020), 11-20

AngryBERT: Joint Learning Target and Emotion for Hate Speech Detection

Md Rabiul Awal, Rui Cao, Roy Ka‑Wei Lee, Sandra Mitrovic. The pacific‑asia conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (PAKDD 2021).

On Analyzing Annotation Consistency in Online Abusive Behavior Datasets

Md Rabiul Awal, Rui Cao, Roy Ka‑Wei Lee, Sandra Mitrovic. The 14th International Conference on Web and Social Media (Data Challenge-2020) (ICWSM Data Challenge 2020), short paper.

Action‑Centric Relation Transformer Network for Video Question Answering

Jipeng Zhang, Jie Shao, Rui Cao, Lianli Gao, Xing Xu, Heng Tao Shen. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology 32 (1) (TCSVT), 63-74

Information fusion in visual question answering: A Survey

Dongxiang Zhang, Rui Cao, Sai Wu. Information Fusion, 52, 268-280.