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 multi-agent foundation model systems for decision-making in complex multimodal real-world environments. 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).
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
- (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.
- (6/13/26) One paper is accepted by MICCAI’26. Congratulations to my student Meng for their work on tool-augmented VLM for endovascular intervention modeling!
- (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!
- (4/6/26) I am honored to receive the VT COE Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award!
- (2/21/26) One paper is accepted by CVPR’26. Congratulations to my student Meng for their work on tool-augmented reasoning in VLM agents!
- (1/26/26) One paper is accepted by ICLR’26. Congratulations to my student Gaurav for their work on benchmark-free evaluation of language model reasoning!
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My Schedule
You can find my schedule here. The “Week” view will present you the details of slots.
