Education
Ph.D., Computer Science — University of Virginia, Charlottesville
Expected May 2030
Master of Computer Science — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · GPA 4.00/4.00
May 2024
B.S., Computer Science — University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Highest Honor, GPA 4.00/4.00
May 2024
Experience
PhD Research — Machine Learning Group, University of Virginia (Advisor: Prof. Aidong Zhang)
Jan 2025 – present
- Research on spurious biases and robustness of multimodal large language models (MM-SPUBench, KDD 2026; typographic attack defense, ECCV 2026)
- Sparse autoencoders for interpretability and faithful retrieval-augmented generation (ICLR 2026; AAAI 2026)
- Latent computation and reasoning in LLMs; mechanistic interpretability
Graduate Research Assistant — Collaborative Robotics Lab, University of Virginia
Aug 2024 – Dec 2024
Graduate Teaching Assistant, CS 415 Game Development — UIUC
Jan 2024 – May 2024
Graduate Teaching Assistant, CS 410 Text Information System — UIUC
Aug 2023 – Dec 2023
Software Developer Intern — DRW Holdings, Chicago
Aug 2022 – Dec 2022
- Developed a market data ingestor in Java per exchange guidelines; investigated real-time market data errors
- Built a React.js monitoring page for data availability; refactored data delivery API on Ruby on Rails
- Optimized PostgreSQL database transactions; built a multi-threaded traffic repeater in Java
- Deployed the repeater on Kubernetes (24/7) with automated Splunk data fetching and error logging
Research Assistant, UrbanIR — Shenlong Wang's Research Group, UIUC
May 2022 – May 2023
- Large-scale urban scene inverse rendering from a single video (published; see Publications)
- Investigated relighting models (NeRF-OSR); set up customized training on SLURM clusters
- Integrated luma-plugin with Unreal Engine for rendering comparisons
Research Assistant — Illinois Space Grant Consortium Undergraduate Research Program
May 2022 – Jul 2022
- Built Unity software for structural monitoring in mixed reality (Oculus Quest 2, Vive Pro Eye)
- Extended ARENA-xr for web-based multi-agent VR with user-end computation
Research Member, Mobility and Fall Prevention Research Lab — UIUC
Oct 2021 – May 2022
- Automated EEG data processing pipeline; statistical analysis for anxiety-related channels
- Evaluated classifiers for state anxiety in VR (published at IEEE EMBC 2022)
WYSE 2022 Mentor — Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering, Champaign, IL
Jun 2022 – Aug 2022
- Mentored two high school students in building interest in computer science, from introductory CS to 3D application development
Course Assistant, CS 125: Introduction to Computer Science — UIUC
Jan 2020 – May 2020
- Office hours for algorithms, Java, and Android Studio; guided lab section of 20 students on coding and debugging
Projects & Research
Typographic Attack Robustness — UVA Machine Learning Group
2025 – 2026
- Training-free concept localization to defend multimodal LLMs against typographic attacks — accepted to ECCV 2026
Multimodal Spurious Bias — UVA / multi-institution collaboration
2024 – 2026
- MM-SPUBench benchmark (KDD 2026) and SAGE spuriousness-aware prompt exploration (AAAI 2026) for mitigating multimodal bias
Sparse Autoencoders for Faithful RAG — UVA Machine Learning Group
2025 – 2026
- SAE-based analysis and steering of retrieval-augmented generation for faithfulness (ICLR 2026); latent computation modes in LLM reasoning
Bili-Loop — Chrome extension for looping videos on bilibili.com
2021 – present
- Distributed on the Microsoft Store with 200+ users
Few-shot Document Classification — CS 512 Data Mining project, UIUC (Team Lead)
Aug 2023 – Jan 2024
- Event role affinity estimation with RoBERTa prompting; zero-shot role merging via graph neighborhood finding; document clustering with LM embeddings + GCN
Curriculum Learning on ALFWorld — CS 598 Embodied NLP, UIUC (Equal Contributor)
Jan 2024 – May 2024
- Performance-enhancing curriculum from plan/action length statistics; potential for automatic LLM curriculum generation
Research & Technical Skills
Research: Multimodal Large Language Models · Model Robustness & Spurious Biases · Mechanistic Interpretability (Sparse Autoencoders) · Retrieval-Augmented Generation · Vision-Language Reasoning · Benchmark Design
ML Engineering: PyTorch · Transformers / LLaVA / Qwen-VL · Model Fine-tuning & Evaluation · Large-scale Experimentation on HPC (SLURM)
Software: Python · Java · JavaScript/React.js · C# (Unity) · Ruby on Rails · PostgreSQL · Kubernetes · Linux
Community & Service
- Organizer, 5th Workshop on Large Language and Vision Models for Autonomous Driving (LLVM-AD), WACV 2026
- Reviewer, AAAI 2027
- Reviewer, NeurIPS 2026
- Teaching Assistant, CS 415 Game Development and CS 410 Text Information System, UIUC, 2023–2024
- Course Assistant, CS 125 Introduction to Computer Science, UIUC, 2020
- Mentor, Worldwide Youth in Science and Engineering (WYSE), UIUC, 2022
Contact
Email: [email protected]
GitHub: github.com/Liu-524
Scholar: Google Scholar profile