👨🏫 About Me
I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Exeter. Previously, I worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Trustworthy Autonomous Cyber-Physical Systems (TACPS) Lab at the University of Liverpool, supervised by Prof. Xiaowei Huang. I obtained my PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Lancaster University, supervised by Dr. Wenjie Ruan, Dr. Leandro Soriano Marcolino, and Prof. Qiang Ni.
My research focuses on the robustness evaluation of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), including:
- Safety testing for safety-critical systems
- Adversarial attacks and defenses
- Robustness verification
I have conducted robustness analysis across multiple modalities: image classifiers, video recognition models, 3D point cloud models, reinforcement learning, and large language models (LLMs).
🎯 Research Aims
- Advance the robustness of deep learning systems.
- Develop methods for safety testing, adversarial defense, and robustness verification in AI, including images, videos, reinforcement learning, large language models, and multimodal systems.
- Explore cross-disciplinary applications of reinforcement learning, including protein design and electrical power systems.
📰 News & Updates
- Sep 2025 – Awarded the Individual Research Grant from the Royal Society.
- Aug 2025 – Congratulations to my PhD student Zixia Wang: “Safety of Embodied Navigation: A Survey” accepted at IJCAI 2025.
- Aug 2025 – Our survey “Safeguarding Large Language Models: A Survey” accepted by Artificial Intelligence Review.
- Apr 2025 – Paper accepted by IEEE TIFS. Congrats to all co-authors.
- Jan 2025 – Paper accepted by ICLR. Congrats to all co-authors.
- Aug 2024 – Started my position as Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Exeter.
📢 PhD Recruitment
I am currently recruiting new PhD candidates with interests in the following areas:
- Safe, Secure and Explainable AI
- Probabilistic Verification
- Reinforcement Learning and its applications, NLP, and Computer Vision
📧 If you are interested, please contact me via email.
💪 PhD students will also join our TurGreen AI Lab, with full support from all Principal Investigators
💡 Funding Opportunities for Students/Researchers
🔬 Research Grants
Certifying Robustness in Large Language Models (PI)
Royal Society, Oct 2025 – Oct 2026, £30KCRoCS: Certified Robust and Scalable Autonomous Operation in Cyber Space (Co-I)
Alan Turing Institute (AICD Centre), Dec 2023 – Dec 2024, £80KSafeguarding LLMs (Co-I)
Alan Turing Institute, Dec 2023 – Jun 2024EnnCore: End-to-End Conceptual Guarding of Neural Architectures (Research Assistant)
UK EPSRC, 2020 – 2024FOCETA: Foundations for Continuous Engineering of Trustworthy Autonomy (Research Assistant)
EU H2020, 2021 – 2023AELARS: Towards Accountable and Explainable Learning-enabled Autonomous Robotic Systems (Research Assistant)
UK EPSRC, 2020 – 2022