Sean Du

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Assistant Professor

College of Computing and Data Science (CCDS),

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

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

NTU email: xuefeng.du (at) ntu.edu.sg.

Office: N3.2-01-25

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

About Me

Short Bio. Hi! I am an 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 (ML), foundation model reliability, and related applications, specifically I work on:
  • Algorithmic reliability: designing adaptive and interpretable learning principles that help ML models detect and generalize on out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, such as semantic/covariate shifts, adversarial and noisy samples.
  • Language model reliability: understanding the blindspots of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal LLMs through uncertainty estimation, such as model hallucination detection and mitigation, malicious prompt prevention, etc.
  • Interdisciplinary research: Biometrics, AI-aided cryo-microscopy/protein structural analysis.

[Radio Lab Recruiting]. I am looking for self-motivated Research Assistants, Visiting Students and Interns in the fall! Please check the Recruitment Page for details. For PhD applicants, the NTU CCDS recruits students at Spring and Fall semesters per year, please mind the deadlines (e.g. 7/31 for Spring'26 intake and 1/31 for Fall'26 intake) and check the website for more information, directly apply here and mention my name in the system. For the other positions, there are no strict deadlines but depend on the Lab's availability.

Before you email me, I strongly suggest reading my Advising Statement to get to know me and the Lab.

Due to the large volume of interest and limited availability, I am currently prioritizing applicants with strong ML research experience, ideally with publications or relevant project experience in theory and algorithms for LLM safety. Please direct all emails to radiolab.ntu.recruiting (at) gmail.com!

News

  • [11/25/2025] Our lab receives the Google Cloud Research Credits and NSCC Young Investigator Seed Project Award.
  • [11/4/2025] My research has been featured at AAAI-26 New Faculty Highlights Program.
  • [9/15/2025] I start my tenure track at NTU CCDS!
  • [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

Links

  • Jennifier's paper writing tips. Most of my papers follow this guideline.

    • Last updated: June 2025