About Me

I'm a third-year Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) 🌽 advised by Jiaqi Ma. During my PhD, I've had the immense delight of interning at Amazon AWS AI Lab 🗽 and National Institute of Informatics 🇯🇵. Previously, I obtained my Master degree from UIUC 🌽 and dual Bachelor degree from University of Michigan 〽️ and Shanghai Jiao Tong University 🇨🇳.

I'm interested in the broad area of machine learning and artificial intelligence, with the goal being to draw theoretical insights from practical problems and develop algorithms with provable guarantees and desirable properties such as efficiency, robustness, and fairness. Recently, my research focuses on understanding data, including the following three aspects:

Data Attribution: Understanding how training data influences AI models.
Data Curation: How to curate/generate/augment (synthetic) data that further helps models generalize?
Data-Centric Privacy: Can above be done without compromising privacy when safety-critical or sensitive data is involved? This includes (differential) privacy, machine unlearning, etc.

Previously I have worked on graph neural networks and fast graph algorithms. Generally speaking, I hold a strong interest in theoretical stuffs that involves geometry.

🗞️ News

[Jun. 2026] 🚀 Incoming intern @SIG Deep Learning team, come hanging out in Philly 🦅!
[Jan. 2026] 👨‍🎓 Incoming fellow @Anthropic Alignment Science team, come hanging out in San Francisco 🌉!
[Oct. 2025] 📚 We are organizing the Symposium on Information Retrieval and Language Models at UIUC!
[Oct. 2025] 🎙️ Giving a tutorial on recent tricks in computing gradient-based data attribution, including GraSS!
[Sep. 2025] 🍻 Please check out our new survey paper 📝 on data attribution!
[Sep. 2025] 🍻 Two papers 📝 accepted by NeurIPS 2025 with one first-authored and one co-first-authored!
[Aug. 2025] 🎓 Get my M.S. Applied Math Degree at UIUC!
[Jul. 2025] 📚 We are organizing the 3rd Workshop on Regulatable Machine Learning in conjunction with NeurIPS 2025!
[Jul. 2025] 🎙️ Giving a talk on Data Attribution at the Guided Generation Group (GGG)!
[Jun. 2025] 🤖 Attending the first AI Startup School held by Y Combinator, see you in San Francisco 🌉!
[Mar. 2025] 🚀 Interning @Amazon AWS AI Deep Engine Science team, come hanging out in New York 🗽!
[Jan. 2025] 🍻 One paper 📝 accepted by ICLR 2025.
[Nov. 2024] 🏆 Received the Graduate Conference Travel Award from UIUC!
[Oct. 2024] 🏆 Received the NeurIPS 2024 Scholar Award, see you in Vancouver!
[Sep. 2024] 🍻 Two papers 📝 accepted by NeurIPS 2024 with one Spotlight.
[Jun. 2024] 📚 We launched the ongoing Data Attribution Reading Group.
[May 2024] 🚀 Interning @National Institute of Informatics, come hanging out in Tokyo 🇯🇵!