About
Short Biography
Dongxiao Zhu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Wayne State University, where he received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His research centers on Trustworthy AI and Applications — advancing adversarial robustness, explainability, and fairness of deep learning systems for use in health, urban, and social computing.
Dr. Zhu is the Founding Director of the Wayne AI Research Initiative, Inaugural Director of the Institute for AI and Data Science, and Director of the Trustworthy AI Lab at Wayne State University. He has authored 100+ peer-reviewed publications and serves on program committees of flagship venues including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, EMNLP, AMIA, and MICCAI. His research has been funded by NSF, NIH, and private agencies.
In addition to foundational AI research, Dr. Zhu pursues use-inspired AI research addressing pressing human-centered challenges — including mobility equity, health disparities, and future of work — with work featured in Detroit PBS, WJR Radio, and Hour Detroit Magazine. He is also deeply committed to AI education, having founded Wayne State's M.S. in AI program, now ranked #20 nationally.
Founding Director
Wayne AI Research Initiative
Wayne State University
Wayne State University
Inaugural Director
Institute for AI and Data Science
Wayne State University
Wayne State University
Director
Trustworthy AI Lab
Wayne State University
Wayne State University
Updates
News
- May 2026 AwardThrilled to receive the Gold Reviewer Award from the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026).
- Apr 2026 GrantOur project titled "Aligning Large Reasoning Models via Safety-aware Post-Training" has been awarded by National AI Research Resources (NAIRR) led by NSF!
- Apr 2026 ServiceI am serving as an Area Chair for NeurIPS-2026.
- Mar 2026 TalkExcited to give a talk on "Generative AI Interplay with Humanity and Society" at WSU's Humanity Symposium.
- Feb 2026 PaperOur AI for public good paper, first authored by my student Rafi Ibn Sultan titled "WalkGPT: Grounded Vision–Language Conversation with Depth-Aware Segmentation for Pedestrian Navigation" has been accepted for publication in The IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2026 (CVPR-26).
- Feb 2026 TalkI am excited to give a public presentation on AI Literacy in Royal Oak Public Library.
- Feb 2026 PaperOur paper, "FluenceFormer: Transformer-Driven Multi-Beam Fluence Map Regression for Radiotherapy Planning", on AI-Assist Radiotherapy Planning has been accepted for publication in Medical Imaging with Deep Learning (MIDL-2026). This work is first-authored by my student Ujunwa Mgboh.
- Feb 2026 TalkI am giving an invited talk titled "Towards Trustworthy Foundation Models: From Precise Unlearning to Grounded Multimodal Reasoning" in the Department of Computer Science at University of Texas at Dallas.
- Jan 2026 PaperLLM unlearning paper first-authored by my student Saleh Zare Zade, titled "Attention Smoothing is All You Need for Unlearning" accepted by The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR-26).
- Dec 2025 ServiceI am serving on the Senior Program Committee for IJCAI-ECAI 2026.
- Nov 2025 TalkI was invited to speak at AI in the Public Sector sponsored by Boston Consulting Group.
- Nov 2025 NewsI was invited to interview for "Making AI Work for the Public: An ALT Perspective".
- Nov 2025 PaperLLM unlearning paper first-authored by my student Xiangyu Zhou, titled "Not All Tokens Are Meant to Be Forgotten" accepted for an oral presentation at The 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-26).
- Oct 2025 NewsI am appointed as the inaugural Director of the Institute for AI and Data Science at WSU.
- Oct 2025 NewsI offer a new course on Trustworthy AI for Large Language Model and Vision-Language Model in Winter 2026.
- Oct 2025 TalkI am invited to speak at MSU Research Foundation Data Science & AI Summit 2025.
- Sept 2025 NewsI serve on NSF CISE panel (X4 in 2024-2025).
- Aug 2025 GrantMy use-inspired AI research project titled "VisionWay: Accessibility-aware Path Selection for Wayfinding" has been funded by NIH!
- Aug 2025 GrantMy foundational AI research project titled "Collaborative Research: III: Medium: Advancing Large Language Model Unlearning: Foundations and Applications" has been funded by NSF!
- Aug 2025 ServiceI am serving on NIH review panel on Biomedical Informatics and Data Science (X3).
- Jul 2025 ServiceI am serving on the Senior Program Committee (Area Chair) for AAAI 2026.
- Jul 2025 ServiceI am serving on DOE review panel.
- Jul 2025 PaperTwo papers accepted by European Conference in AI (ECAI-25), first authored by my students Rafi Sultan and Saleh Zare Zade.
- May 2025 ServiceI am serving as the Area Chair for NeurIPS 2025.
- Mar 2025 PaperCollaborative paper titled "Collective Consent: Who Needs to Consent to the Donation of Data Representing Multiple People?" accepted by The 27th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW 2025).
- Mar 2025 PaperMedical imaging research paper on "enhancing CT image segmentation accuracy through ensemble loss function optimization", first authored by my student Chengyin Li was accepted by the journal Medical Physics.
- Mar 2025 PaperCollaborative paper on mechanical evolution of metastatic cancer cells was accepted by the journal Small.
- Feb 2025 PaperThe LLM healthcare paper (conversational risk assessment), first authored by my student Mohammad Amin Roshani was accepted by Journal of Medical Internet Research - AI (JAI).
- Jan 2025 ServiceServing as a meta-reviewer for 34th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2025).
- Oct 2024 PaperTwo papers accepted by WACV 2025, first authored by my student Chengyin Li.
- Sept 2024 GrantI am part of Geriatrics Workforce Enhancement Program project supported by $5M Health Resources and Services Administration grant!
- Aug 2024 TalkI am co-organizing the 3rd Workshop on Adversarial Machine Learning Frontiers @ NeurIPS-24.
- Jul 2024 NewsCongratulations to Dr. Qiang Yao for completing his successful PhD journey and start his career as Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at Oakland University! Dissertation: Designing for Reliability: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.
- Jul 2024 NewsCongratulations to Dr. Chengyin Li for completing his successful PhD journey and start his career as a staff scientist at Henry Ford Health! Dissertation: Novel Transformer Architectures for 3D Multi-modal and Multi-organ Medical Image Segmentation.
- Jul 2024 PaperThe paper entitled "Fairness-aware Vision Transformer via Debiased Self-Attention" first authored by my student Qiang Yao has been accepted by ECCV-24.
- Jun 2024 ServiceI am serving on a NIH study section again.
- May 2024 TalkI am excited to participate in NSF Workshop on Envisioning Open Research Resources for AI.
- May 2024 ServiceI am serving on a NSF CISE panel again.
- Apr 2024 AwardCongratulations to Chengyin Li on winning the prestigious Michael E. Conrad Award!
- Apr 2024 NewsOur AI for mobility and future of work research was featured on Detroit PBS.
- Mar 2024 NewsThe MS AI program I created in collaboration with ECE and ISE departments is ranked #20 in the nation by TechGuide.
- Mar 2024 ServiceI am serving on a NIH study section.
- Feb 2024 PaperOur recent work learns to poison LLMs during instruction tuning!
- Feb 2024 ServiceI am serving on a NSF CISE panel.
- Jan 2024 PaperOur paper titled: Benchmark and Neural Architecture for Conversational Entity Retrieval from a Knowledge Graph is accepted by ACM TheWebConf-24, accept rate is 806/4,028 = 20.2%.
- Jan 2024 PaperOur paper titled: Traumatic Data: Applying Trauma-Informed Design to Data Donation of Sexual Violence Experiences to Improve Sexual Risk Detection AI is accepted by ACM CHI-24, accept rate is 1,060/4,028 = 26.3%.
- Dec 2023 TalkI gave an invited talk at National Science Foundation, titled "Towards Trustworthy AGI in the Era of Foundation Models – Opportunities, Risks, and Vision”.
- Dec 2023 PaperOur paper titled: MFABA: A More Faithful and Accelerated Boundary-based Attribution Method for Deep Neural Networks is accepted by AAAI-24, accept rate is 2,342/12,100 = 23.75%.
- Dec 2023 ServiceI serve as a meta-reviewer for AI ethics track at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-24).
- Nov 2023 PaperOur recent work on fine tuning Segment Anything Model (SAM) for automated mobility infrastructure segmentation is available on arxiv.
- Oct 2023 PaperOur recent work uncovers the vulnerabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) from a novel lens of Adversarial In-Context Learning!
- Aug 2023 ServiceI serve as a meta-reviewer for Robustness & Trustworthiness track at the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24).
- Jun 2023 PaperThe paper titled "FocalUNETR: A Focal Transformer for Boundary-aware Prostate Segmentation using CT Images" first authored by my student Chengyin Li has been accepted by MICCAI-23, accept rate is 740/2,250 = 32%.
- May 2023 AwardCongratulations to Yao Qiang on winning the prestigious Michael E. Conrad Award!
- Apr 2023 NewsI was recommended for the promotion to full professor, effective Aug. 17 2023!
- Apr 2023 PaperThe paper entitled "Negative Flux Aggregation to Estimate Feature Attributions" first authored by my student Xin Li has been accepted by IJCAI-23, accept rate is 685/4,566=15%.
- Apr 2023 PaperOur position paper titled "Cancer.pdf" target="_blank">ChatGPT- a promising generative AI tool and its implications on cancer care" published in Cancer.
- Apr 2023 TalkI am giving an invited talk on Enhancing Algorithmic Fairness in Deep Learning at Department of Computer Science and Engineering of University at Buffalo.
- Apr 2023 TalkI am served as a panelist on the workshop on Fairness in Machine Intelligence for Global Health 2023.
- Mar 2023 TalkI am co-organizing 2nd Workshop on New Frontiers in Adversarial Machine Learning (AdvML) at ICML-2023!
- Feb 2023 ServiceI served as a topic editor for Evolution in Statistical Genetics and Methodology at Frontiers in Genetics journal.
- Feb 2023 ServiceI served as a meta-reviewer for AI ethics track at International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-23).
- Jan 2023 TalkI gave an invited talk on Enhancing Algorithmic Fairness in Deep Learning at Department of Statistics and Probability of Michigan State University.
- Jan 2023 NewsI created the new online MS Program in Computer Science with concentration on AI.
- Dec 2022 GrantI received a NIH R33 grant (MPI) in developing a chatbot to acquire social, clinical and molecular determinants for personalized on-device MIS-C risk assessment, total amount is $1,449,684.
- Dec 2022 GrantI received a NSF Convergence Accelerator grant (co-PI) in learning geospatial features and developing human-centered AI for enhancing mobility equity for persons with disabilities, total amount is $613,621.
- Nov 2022 PaperThe paper entitled "Learning Compact Features via In-Training Representation Alignment" first authored by my student Xin Li has been accepted by AAAI-23, accept rate is 1,721/8,777=19.6%.
- Nov 2022 TalkI gave an invited talk on Empowering Explainable Machine Learning through the Lens of Adversarial Robustness and Fairness at Computer Science and Engineering Department of Michigan State University.
- Sept 2022 PaperTrustworthy AI paper titled "AttCAT: Explaining Transformers via Attentive Class Activation Tokens." first authored by my student Mr. Yao Qiang has been accepted by NuerIPS-22, accept rate is 2,665/10,411 = 25.6%.
- Aug 2022 GrantI received a NSF HCC grant (PI) in leveraging AI for better cyber-social behavior via enhancing trust in data donation from users, total amount is $600,000.
- Aug 2022 NewsI created the new Master program in AI (Algorithms and Systems Track) hosted by Computer Science department. Interested students please contact me for further info.
- Jun 2022 NewsCongratulations to Dr. Xin Li for completing his successful PhD journey! Dissertation: Adversarial Machine Learning for Advanced Medical Imaging Systems.
- Jun 2022 PaperMy student Mr. Chengyin Li's first first-author machine learning paper on privacy-aware and resource-constraint EV charging recommendation algorithm titled "Coupling User Preference with External Rewards to Enable Driver-centered and Resource-aware EV Charging Recommendation" accepted by ECML-PKDD 2022, accept rate is 242/932 = 26%.
- May 2022 TalkI am giving a Keynote Speech at Adversarial Machine Learning towards Advanced Vision Systems (AMLAVS) workshop @ACCV-2022.
- Apr 2022 PaperTrustworthy AI paper titled "Counterfactual Interpolation Augmentation (CIA): A Unified Approach to Enhance Fairness and Explainability of DNN." first authored by my student Mr. Yao Qiang has been accepted by 31st International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-22), accept rate is 680/4535 = 15%.
- Apr 2022 AwardI am honored and pleased to be selected to receive the "College of Engineering Excellence in Research" Award. Thanks to the department of computer science and college of engineering for your support!
- Mar 2022 PaperOne of the collaborative work on "Deep learning protocol for improved photoacoustic brain imaging" has been recognized as a top cited article in Journal of Biophotonics (Certificate).
- Mar 2022 TalkI am co-organizing 1st Workshop on New Frontiers in Adversarial Machine Learning (AdvML) at ICML-2022! Program focuses on new theory/algorithm/application stack of AdvML and Trustworthy ML (Poster). Submission deadline: May 23 2022.
- Mar 2022 NewsCongratulations to Dr. Deng Pan for completing his successful PhD journey! Dissertation: Interpretable Machine Learning and Applications.
- Jan 2022 GrantAnnouncements - two fully funded PhD student positions in machine learning research available in Fall 2022! Strong background in mathematics and programming are desirable. Contact me with CV, transcripts, and/or publications.
- Dec 2021 NewsNew tenure-track faculty position available @ Wayne State CS - preferred qualification in machine learning and AI.
- Nov 2021 TalkI am giving an invited talk titled "Robust and Explainable Machine Learning Algorithms for Social Good" at Department of Computer and Data Sciences at Case Western Reserve University.