Xuan Wang

Xuan Wang

Assistant Professor

Welcome to Xuan’s Homepage!

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech (VT), and a faculty member of the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics.

I develop scalable and reliable foundation models and agentic systems for autonomous decision-making under real-world constraints. My work is motivated by high-stakes domains such as science and healthcare. My work has been recognized by the NSF CAREER Award (2025), NVIDIA Academic Grant (2025), Cisco Research Award (2025-2026), and the NAACL Best Demo Paper Award (2021). Our research is sponsored by NSF, NIH, USDA, and generous gifts from Nvidia, Amazon, and Cisco.

I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) under the supervision of Dr. Jiawei Han. During my Ph.D. study, I also worked at IBM Research as a summer intern. I received my M.S. in Statistics and my M.S. in Biochemistry from UIUC. I received my B.S. in Biological Science from Tsinghua University, China. Here is my full CV.

News and Highlights

  • (8/21/26) We are grateful to receive a USDA NIFA grant (2 years, $300K total; PI: Dr. Jingqiu Liao) for the project An Adaptive AI Framework For Interpretable And Scalable Source Tracking Of Salmonella Using Whole Genome Sequencing Data.
  • (8/21/26) We are grateful to receive an NSF NAIRR Pilot award (1 year, 20K GPU Hours on NCSA Delta) for the project Efficient Multimodal Long Context Reasoning via Parameter Generation.
  • (8/21/26) Two papers are accepted by EMNLP’26. Congratulations to my student Jun for their work on multi-agent error detection and attribution with causal graph building!
  • (8/19/26) I am honored to receive the VT CS Rising Star Researcher Award!
  • (8/8/26) We are excited to present a tutorial of Towards The Science of Multi-Agent Communication at NeurIPS 2026! Looking forward to seeing everyone in Atlanta in December!
  • (7/22/26) We are grateful to receive an NSF PCL-Test Bed grant (4 years, $20M total; PI: Dr. Rose Hu) for the project AI-enabled, Cloud-based Self-Driving Nanofabrication Node for Accelerating Semiconductor Research and Education.
  • (7/22/26) We are grateful to receive an NIH NIA R21 grant (2 years, $460K total; PI: Dr. Huaiyang Zhong) for the project Advancing Chronic Pain Care in Rural Seniors: Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to Improve Understanding, Assessment, and Comorbidity Risk Prediction.
  • (7/22/26) We are grateful to receive a USDA NIFA grant (3 years, $799K total; PI: Dr. Klaus Moeltner) for the project Developing and Evaluating Fine-Tuned Synthetic Agents as a Foundational Paradigm for Nonmarket Valuation and Benefit Transfer.
  • (4/30/26) Three papers are accepted by ICML’26. Congratulations to my students Gaurav, Yi, and Priya for their work on SLM agentic framework, foundation model architecture search, and multi-agent coordination under real-world conditions without ground truth!
  • (4/13/26) Congratulations to my student Gaurav for receiving the VT CS Outstanding MS Research Award!
  • (4/6/26) Two papers and one demo paper are accepted by ACL’26. Congratulations to my student Gaurav for their work on LLM overthinking!
  • …

My Schedule

You can find my schedule here. The “Week” view will present you the details of slots.