Sean (Xuefeng) Du

Ph.D. Student

CS department, University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison)

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

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[Research] [Education] [Publications] [Talks] [Awards & Service] [Skill] [Teaching] [Media Coverage] [Person]

Short Bio
Hi! I am a fifth-year CS Ph.D. student at UW-Madison advised by Prof. Sharon Yixuan Li. Previously, I was an undergraduate student at Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) majoring in electronic engineering.
My current research focus is to develop theory and algorithms for reliable machine learning, foundation model reliability, and related applications, specifically I work on:
News
  • [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!!

    • Research Experience
    Education
    • Ph.D. in CS. 2020 - 2025 (Expected)
      University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW-Madison), Madison, WI, USA
    • B.Eng. in electronic engineering 2016 - 2020
      Xi'an Jiaotong university (XJTU), Xi'an, China
    Publications and preprints
    You can also browse my Google Scholar profile. I publish under the name "Xuefeng Du".
    1. Understanding Multimodal LLMs Under Distribution Shifts: An Information-Theoretic Approach
      Changdae Oh, Zhen Fang, Shawn Im, Xuefeng Du, Yixuan Li.
      Manuscript 2025.
      [PDF][Code]
    2. HaloScope: Harnessing Unlabeled LLM Generations for Hallucination Detection
      Xuefeng Du, Chaowei Xiao, Yixuan Li.
      NeurIPS 2024.(Spotlight)
      [PDF][Code]
    3. Exploring Transition States of Protein Conformational Changes via Out-of-Distribution Detection in the Hyperspherical Latent Space
      Bojun Liu, Jordan G Boysen, Ilona Christy Unarta, Xuefeng Du, Yixuan Li, Xuhui Huang.
      Nature Communications.
      [PDF][Code]
    4. Safety-Aware Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
      Hyeong Kyu Choi, Xuefeng Du, Yixuan Li.
      NeurIPS 2024 Safe Generative AI Workshop.
      [PDF][Code]
    5. How Reliable Is Human Feedback For Aligning Large Language Models?
      Min-Hsuan Yeh, Leitian Tao, Jeffrey Wang, Xuefeng Du, Yixuan Li.
      Manuscript 2024.
      [PDF][Code]
    6. VLMGuard: Defending VLMs against Malicious Prompts via Unlabeled Data
      Xuefeng Du, Reshmi Ghosh, Robert Sim, Ahmed Salem, Vitor Carvalho, Emily Lawton, Yixuan Li, Jack W. Stokes.
      Manuscript 2024.
      [PDF][Code]
    7. The Ghanaian NLP Landscape: A First Look
      Sheriff Issaka, Zhaoyi Zhang, Mihir Heda, Keyi Wang, Yinka Ajibola, Ryan DeMar, Xuefeng Du.
      Manuscript 2024.
      [PDF][Code]
    8. Out-of-Distribution Learning with Human Feedback
      Haoyue Bai, Xuefeng Du, Katie Rainey, Shibin Parameswaran, Yixuan Li.
      Manuscript 2024.
      [PDF][Code]
    9. When and How Does In-Distribution Label Help Out-of-Distribution Detection?
      Xuefeng Du, Yiyou sun, Yixuan Li.
      ICML 2024 (Poster)
      [PDF][Code]
    10. How Does Unlabeled Data Provably Help Out-of-distribution Detection?
      *Xuefeng Du*, *Zhen Fang*, Ilias Diakonikolas, Yixuan Li.
      ICLR 2024 (Poster)
      [PDF] [Code]
    11. Feed Two Birds with One Scone: Exploiting Wild Data for Both Out-of-Distribution Generalization and Detection
      Haoyue Bai, Gregory Canal, Xuefeng Du, Jeongyeol Kwon, Robert D Nowak, Yixuan Li.
      ICML 2023 (Poster)
      [PDF][Code]
    12. Dream the Impossible: Outlier Imagination with Diffusion Models
      Xuefeng Du, Yiyou Sun, Xiaojin Zhu, Yixuan Li.
      NeurIPS 2023 (Poster)
      [PDF][Code]
    13. Openood v1. 5: Enhanced benchmark for out-of-distribution detection.
      Jingyang Zhang, Jingkang Yang, Pengyun Wang, Haoqi Wang, Yueqian Lin, Haoran Zhang, Yiyou Sun, Xuefeng Du, Kaiyang Zhou, Wayne Zhang, Yixuan Li, Ziwei Liu, Yiran Chen, Hai Li.
      NeurIPS 2023, DistShift Workshop
      [PDF][Code]
    14. Non-parametric Outlier Synthesis
      Leitian Tao, Xuefeng Du, Jerry Zhu, Yixuan Li.
      ICLR 2023 (Poster)
      [PDF][Code]
    15. Noise-robust Graph Learning by Estimating and Leveraging Pairwise Interactions
      Xuefeng Du, Tian Bian, Yu Rong, Bo Han, Tongliang Liu, Tingyang Xu, Wenbing Huang, Yixuan Li, Junzhou Huang.
      Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR) 2023
      [PDF][Code]
    16. SIREN: Shaping Representations for Detecting Out-of-distribution Objects
      Xuefeng Du, Gabriel Gozum, Yifei Ming, Yixuan Li.
      NeurIPS 2022 (Poster)
      [PDF][Code]
    17. OpenOOD: Benchmarking Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection.
      Jingkang Yang, Pengyun Wang, Dejian Zou, Zitang Zhou, Kunyuan Ding, Wenxuan Peng, Haoqi Wang, Guangyao Chen, Bo Li, Yiyou Sun, Xuefeng Du, Kaiyang Zhou, Wayne Zhang, Dan Hendrycks, Yixuan Li, Ziwei Liu.
      NeurIPS 2022, Datasets and Benchmarks Track
      [PDF][Code]
    18. Unknown-Aware Object Detection: Learning What You Don't Know from Videos in the Wild.
      Xuefeng Du, Xin Wang, Gabriel Gozum, Yixuan Li.
      CVPR 2022 (Oral)
      [PDF] [Code]
    19. VOS: Learning What You Don’t Know by Virtual Outliers Synthesis.
      Xuefeng Du, Eric Wang, Mu Cai, Yixuan Li.
      ICLR 2022 (Poster)
      [PDF] [Code]
    20. Performance-Aware Mutual Knowledge Distillation for Improving Neural Architecture Search.
      Pengtao Xie, Xuefeng Du.
      CVPR 2022 (Poster)
      [PDF][Code]
    21. Learning Diverse-Structured Networks for Adversarial Robustness.
      Xuefeng Du, Jingfeng Zhang, Bo Han, Tongliang Liu, Yu Rong, Gang Niu, Junzhou Huang, Masashi Sugiyama.
      ICML 2021 (Poster)
      [PDF][Code]
    22. Active learning to classify macromolecular structures in situ for less supervision in cryo-electron tomography.
      Xuefeng Du, Haohan Wang, Zhenxi Zhu, Xiangrui Zeng, Yi-Wei Chang, Jing Zhang, Min Xu.
      Bioinformatics
      [PDF][Code]
    23. How to save your annotation cost for Panoptic Segmentation?.
      Xuefeng Du, Chenhan Jiang, Hang Xu, Gengwei Zhang, Zhenguo Li.
      AAAI 2021 (Poster)
      [PDF][Code]
    24. Node Classification on Graphs with Few-Shot Novel Labels via Meta Transformed Network Embedding.
      Lin Lan, Pinghui Wang, Xuefeng Du, Kaikai Song, Jing Tao, Xiaohong Guan.
      NeurIPS 2020 (Poster)
      [PDF] [Code]
    25. Learning by Passing Tests, with Application to Neural Architecture Search.
      Xuefeng Du, Pengtao Xie.
      arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.15102
      [PDF]
    26. Skillearn: Machine Learning Inspired by Humans' Learning Skills.
      Pengtao Xie, Xuefeng Du, Hao Ban.
      arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.04863
      [PDF]
    27. Small-Group Learning, with Application to Neural Architecture Search.
      Xuefeng Du, Pengtao Xie.
      arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.12502
      [PDF]
    28. A deep biometric hash learning framework for three advanced hand‐based biometrics.
      Huikai Shao, Dexing Zhong, Xuefeng Du.
      IET Biometrics
      [PDF]
    29. Few-shot learning for palmprint recognition via meta-siamese network.
      Huikai Shao, Dexing Zhong, Xuefeng Du, Shaoyi Du, Raymond NJ Veldhuis.
      IEEE transactions on instrumentation and measurement
      [PDF]
    30. Deep distillation hashing for unconstrained palmprint recognition.
      Huikai Shao, Dexing Zhong, Xuefeng Du.
      IEEE transactions on instrumentation and measurement
      [PDF] [Code]
    31. Cross-domain palmprint recognition via regularized adversarial domain adaptive hashing.
      Xuefeng Du, Dexing Zhong, Huikai Shao.
      IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology
      [PDF]
    32. Towards efficient unconstrained palmprint recognition via deep distillation hashing.
      Huikai Shao, Dexing Zhong, Xuefeng Du.
      Manuscript 2020.
      [PDF]
    33. Effective deep ensemble hashing for open-set palmprint recognition.
      Huikai Shao, Dexing Zhong, Xuefeng Du.
      Journal of Electronic Imaging.
      [PDF]
    34. Cross-domain palmprint recognition based on transfer convolutional autoencoder.
      Huikai Shao, Dexing Zhong, Xuefeng Du.
      IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2019.
      [PDF]
    35. Building an active palmprint recognition system.
      Xuefeng Du, Dexing Zhong, Huikai Shao.
      IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2019.
      [PDF]
    36. Continual palmprint recognition without forgetting.
      Xuefeng Du, Dexing Zhong, Huikai Shao.
      IEEE International Conference on Image Processing 2019.
      [PDF] [Code]
    37. Low-shot palmprint recognition based on meta-siamese network.
      Xuefeng Du, Dexing Zhong, Pengna Li.
      IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo 2019.
      [PDF]
    38. A hand-based multi-biometrics via deep hashing network and biometric graph matching.
      Dexing Zhong, Huikai Shao, Xuefeng Du.
      IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.
      [PDF]
    39. Decade progress of palmprint recognition: A brief survey.
      Dexing Zhong, Xuefeng Du, Kuncai Zhong.
      Neurocomputing.
      [PDF]
    40. Classification in cryo-electron tomograms.
      Ilja Gubins, Gijs van der Schot, Remco C Veltkamp, Friedrich Forster, Xuefeng Du, Xiangrui Zeng, Zhenxi Zhu, Lufan Chang, Min Xu, Emmanuel Moebel, Antonio Martinez-Sanchez, Charles Kervrann, Tuan M Lai, Xusi Han, Genki Terashi, Daisuke Kihara, Benjamin A Himes, Xiaohua Wan, Jingrong Zhang, Shan Gao, Yu Hao, Zhilong Lv, Xiaohua Wan, Zhidong Yang, Zijun Ding, Xuefeng Cui, Fa Zhang.
      Eurographics 2019.
      [PDF]
    41. Semi-supervised Macromolecule Structural Classification in Cellular Electron Cryo-Tomograms using 3D Autoencoding Classifier.
      Siyuan Liu, Xuefeng Du,, Rong Xi, Fuya Xu, Xiangrui Zeng, Bo Zhou, Min Xu.
      BMVC 2019.
      [PDF]
    42. Efficient deep palmprint recognition via distilled hashing coding.
      Huikai Shao, Dexing Zhong, Xuefeng Du.
      CVPR Workshop 2019.
      [PDF]
    43. Open-set Recognition of Unseen Macromolecules in Cellular Electron Cryo-Tomograms by Soft Large Margin Centralized Cosine Loss.
      Xuefeng Du, Xiangrui Zeng, Bo Zhou, Alex Singh, Min Xu.
      BMVC 2019.
      [PDF]
    44. Palm vein recognition with deep hashing network.
      Dexing Zhong, Shuming Liu, Wenting Wang, Xuefeng Du.
      Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision 2019.
      [PDF]
    45. Palmprint recognition using siamese network.
      Dexing Zhong, Yuan Yang, Xuefeng Du.
      13th Conference of Biometric Recognition, CCBR 2018.
      [PDF]
    Recent/Upcoming Talks
    • Talk at Adobe Research, 12/2021
    • Talk at Microsoft Research, 12/2021
    • Talk at Google Research, 01/2022
    • Talk at MLOPT Seminar, UW-Madison, 05/2022
    • Talk at AI talks, 02/2023
    • Talk at Jane Street, 04/2023
    • Talk at Microsoft, 08/2024
    • Talk at UCSD, 11/2024
    • Talk at MLOPT Seminar, UW-Madison, 12/2024
    • Talk at HKUST CSE, 12/2024
    • Talk at NTU CCDS, 12/2024
    • Talk at OpenAI, 1/2025
    • Talk at Microsoft Research, 1/2025
    Awards and professional activities
    Awards and Honors
    Academic service
    Reviewer | PC Member
    • Reviewer for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, WACV, AAAI, TMLR, IJCAI, MICCAI, Nature Communications, TCSVT, TMM, TIP, IJCV.
    Department service
    Admission Committee
    • UM-Madison, Master for Data Science Program, 2024.
    Skills
    • AI / data science: Python, Matlab, sklearn, Pytorch, Tensorflow.
    • Development: C, HTML, LaTex, CUDA.
    • Have passion to all the new things!
    Teaching
    Media Coverage
    Person
    • Learned Latte art recently!
    • I like to share experience and lessons on social networks.
    • I love hiking, basketball and swimming!
    • I read every night. History, novel, economics, philosophy...
    • I write a lot. Poetry, sketch, drama...
    • I enjoy watching any movies with good stories!