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Qiaoyu Tan

Assistant Professor

Computer Science Department

New York University Shanghai

Shanghai, China

Email: qiaoyu.tan@nyu.edu

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🎓 PhD Openings for Fall 2026

I am recruiting multiple fully funded PhD students for Fall 2026 from NYU Courant and Tandon with expertise in generative AI (LLM, MLLM, Diffusion Model), Agent and Trustworthy AI. If interested, please feel free to email me with your CV and transcript. Learn more on the Openings page.

Biography

Dr. Qiaoyu Tan is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at NYU Shanghai, jointly affiliated with the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University. Before joining NYU Shanghai, he earned his Ph.D. from Texas A&M University under the supervision of Prof. Xia Hu, and received his B.Eng. from Southwest University, advised by Prof. Guoxian Yu. His research focuses on LLMs, autonomous agents, multimodal intelligence, graph learning, knowledge graphs, and recommendation systems. He has published over 35 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier venues such as ICML, NeurIPS, KDD, WWW, ACL, EMNLP, WSDM, CVPR, and IJCAI, accumulating over 2,000 citations. He received the Best Student Paper Finalist at AMIA 2023. He has successfully led several research projects as Principal Investigator and actively contributes to the academic community, serving as the Ph.D. Symposium Chair for CIKM 2025 and Program Chair for ICHI 2023. Before his current position, he worked as a research intern at Alibaba Damo Academy and Samsung Research America.

Research Interest

My research aims to develop accurate, universal, efficient, and trustworthy AI systems by bridging theoretical innovation with practical impact. Our team focuses on advancing the frontiers of large language models, multimodal intelligence, structured reasoning, and agentic search, with real-world applications spanning question answering, information retrieval, image generation, recommendation systems, bioinformatics, and healthcare.

  • Large Language Models: Multimodal Understanding and Generation, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Post-Training Optimization, Agentic Reasoning, and Autonomous Agents.

  • Trustworthy Machine Learning: AI Safety, Adversarial Attacks, Defense Mechanisms, Responsible, and Interpretable AI Systems.

  • Graph Machine Learning: Graph Foundation Models, Graph RAG, Graph Learning, Graph Neural Networks, Graph Pre-Training, Graph Recommendation Systems.

Research Highlights (Full List)

  • Robust LLMs, TrustGLM: Evaluating the Robustness of GraphLLMs Against Prompt, Text, and Structure Attacks (KDD'25) [link].

  • Graph LLMs, GraphICL: Unlocking Graph Learning Potential in LLMs through Structured Prompt Design (NAACL’25) [link].

  • Interpretable Multimodal Generation, Concept-Centric Token Interpretation for Vector-Quantized Generative Models (ICML’25) [link].

  • Graph Foundation Models, UniGLM: Training One Unified Language Model for Text-Attributed Graphs (WSDM’25) [link].

  • Graph LLMs, GAugLLM: Improving Graph Contrastive Learning for Text-attributed Graphs with Large Language Models (KDD’24) [link].

  • LLM RAG, Retrieval-enhanced Knowledge Editing in Language Models for Multi-Hop Question Answering (CIKM’24) [link].

  • Medical LLMs, Reasoning Like a Doctor: Improving Medical Dialogue Systems via Diagnostic Reasoning Process Alignment (ACL’24) [link].

  • Molecular LLMs, MolecularGPT: Open Large Language Model (LLM) for Few-Shot Molecular Property Prediction (arXiv’24) [link].

  • Graph Pre-Training, S2GAE: Self-Supervised Graph Autoencoders Are Generalizable Learners with Graph Masking (WSDM’23) [link].

Call for Paper

  • PhD Symposium @CIKM’2025 [Website] (4 July 2025).

  • Data-Centric AI Workshop – DCAI @WWW’2024 [Website] (10 February 2024).

News

  • [2025.08] One paper accepted by EMNLP'25.

  • [2025.06] I will serve as the Senior PC member of AAAI'26-AIA.

  • [2025.06] I will serve as the PC member of NeurIPS'25, AAAI'26, LoG'25, KDD'26.

  • [2025.05] One paper accepted by KDD'25.

  • [2024.05] Two PhD students (Jiajin Liu and Chuanhao Ji) are welcomed to join the DIRLab!

  • [2025.05] Two papers accepted by ICML'25.

  • [2025.03] I will serve as the PhD Symposium Chair @ CIKM'25. Welcome to submit your proposal

  • [2025.02] One paper accepted by CVPR'25.

  • [2024.11] One paper accepted by KDD'25 (August Cycle).

  • [2024.10] One paper accepted by WSDM'25.

  • [2024.09] One paper accepted by NeurIPS'24.

  • [2024.07] One paper accepted by CIKM'24.

  • [2024.06] I will serve as the PC member of NeurIPS'24 (main track and D&B Track), LoG'24, CIKM'24, AAAI'25.

  • [2024.06] Two PhD students (Yuanfu Sun and Dongzhe Fan) are welcomed to join the DIRLab!

  • [2024.05] One paper accepted by KDD'24.

  • [2024.05] One paper accepted by ACL'24.

  • [2024.05] One paper accepted by TIST'24.

  • [2024.04] One paper accepted by TKDE'24.

  • [2024.04] One tutorial (RS in the era of LLMs) got accepted by IJCAI'24.

  • [2023.10] Our research in liver transplantation received recognition as a Best Student Paper Finalist at AMIA'23.

  • [2023.09] One paper accepted by NeurIPS'23 (Benchmark track).

  • [2023.09] An invited talk at GPC & ICPCSEE'23 at Harbin, China.

  • [2023.09] I will serve as the PC member of SDM'24.

  • [2023.09] Two papers accepted by ICDM'23. Looking forward to seeing you in Shanghai!

  • [2023.08] One paper accepted by TKDE'23.

  • [2023.08] Two papers accepted by CIKM'23.

  • [2023.08] I will serve as the Session Chair of KDD'23.

  • [2023.07] I will serve as the PC member of AAAI'24 and LoG'23.

  • [2023.07] One paper accepted by TKDE'23.

  • [2023.07] Two papers accepted by AMIA'23.

  • [2023.06] I successfully passed my dissertation defense.

  • [2023.05] I will serve as the PC member of NeurIPS'23.

  • [2023.05] I am an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at NYU Shanghai starting Fall 2023.

  • [2023.04] I will serve as the PC member of CIKM'23.

  • [2023.03] One paper accepted by PAKDD'23.

  • [2023.01] One paper accepted by WWW'23.

  • [2023.05] I will serve as the Web Chair of ICHI'23.

  • [2022.10] Three papers accepted by WSDM'23.

  • [2022.09] One paper accepted by NeurIPS'22.

  • [2022.08] One paper accepted by CIKM'22.

  • [2022.05] I will join Samsung Research America for summer intern, supervised by Dr. Rui Chen.

  • [2021.12] One paper accepted by SDM'22.

  • [2021.08] One paper accepted by CIKM'21.

  • [2021.04] One paper accepted by SIGIR'21.

  • [2020.10] I will visit the DEEP Lab at PolyU, led by Dr. Xiao Huang.

  • [2020.10] One paper accepted by WSDM'21.

  • [2020.10] One paper accepted by AAAI'21.

  • [2020.03] I will join Alibaba Group as Research Intern, supervised by Dr. Hongxia Yang.

  • [2020.01] One paper accepted by WWW'20.

  • [...]