Sean (Xuefeng) Du

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Incoming Assistant Professor

College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS),

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

Email: xdu66 (at) wisc.edu, xuefengdu1 (at) gmail.com

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[CV] [Research Statement] [Teaching Statement] [Advising Statement]

About Me

Short Bio. Hi! I am an incoming Assistant Professor at College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. I obtained my PhD degree in Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) advised by Prof. Sharon Li. Previously, I was an undergraduate student at Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) majoring in electronic engineering.

Research Interest. My current research focus is to develop theory and algorithms for reliable machine learning, foundation model reliability, and related applications, specifically I work on:
  • Out-of-distribution (OOD) research: designing adaptive and interpretable learning algorithms that help ML models detect and generalize on OOD samples, such as semantic/covariate shifts, adversarial and noisy samples.
  • Reliability of foundation models: understanding the blindspots of LLMs and VLMs for improved safeguarding efforts, such as model hallucination and harmful prompt detection.
  • Applications: Graph embedding, object detection and segmentation.
  • Interdisciplinary research: Biometrics, AI-aided cryo-microscopy/protein structural analysis.
⭐ I will lead the Radio Lab at NTU Singapore, working on Responsible, Aligned, Deployable Intelligence for human gOod (Radio).

⭐ I will recruit several PhD students, Research Assistants, Visiting Students and Interns in the fall. Please stayed tuned!

News

  • [5/2025] I defended my PhD thesis !
  • [4/2025] My research is featured at the Wisconsin Engineer Magazine!
  • [1/2025] Receive the CS Ivanisevic Award in UW-Madison CS, awarding to one student in the department with research excellence.
  • [12/2024] Co-organize the special session of Responsible Foundation Models in the Wild at IJCNN 2025.
  • [9/25/2024] One paper on LLM hallucination is accepted to NeurIPS 2024 as spotlight presentation.
  • [9/9/2024] Honored to get selected as Rising Stars in Data Science 2024 (worldwide 30 recipients)!
  • [6/10/2024] Start my internship in Microsoft Research Redmond working on VLM reliability!
  • [5/1/2024] One paper is accepted to ICML 2024.
  • [1/16/2024] One paper is accepted to ICLR 2024.
  • [2/11/2023] Received the Jane Street Graduate Research Fellowship (6 selected out of 600).
  • [3/1/2022] One paper is accepted to CVPR 2022 as oral presentation.
  • [1/15/2021] Join UW-Madison as a PhD student!!

Teaching

Education

  • Ph.D. in CS. 2020 - 2025
    University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison), Madison, WI, USA
  • B.Eng. in electronic engineering 2016 - 2020
    Xi'an Jiaotong university (XJTU), Xi'an, China

    • Last updated: June 2025