I am a Ph.D. student in the Computer & Information Science Department at the University of Delaware. I work under the advice of Prof. Xi Peng in the DeepREAL Lab.

My research interest includes Explainable Machine Learning, Vision-Language Models, Scientific Machine Learning, and Out-of-distribution Generalization. I have published papers at the top-tier AI/ML conferences, such as NeurIPS, CVPR, ECCV, etc.

πŸ“ Publications

AAAI 2025 Oral
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Interpretable Failure Detection with Human-Level Concepts

Kien X. Nguyen, Tang Li, and Xi Peng

Paper | Code

  • In Proceedings of the Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025. (acceptance rate 4.7%)
AAAI 2025
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Beyond Accuracy: On the Effects of Fine-tuning Towards Vision-Language Model’s Prediction Rationality

Qitong Wang, Tang Li, Kien X. Nguyen, and Xi Peng

Paper | Code

  • In Proceedings of the Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2025. (acceptance rate 23.4%)
NeurIPS 2024
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Beyond Accuracy: Ensuring Correct Predictions with Correct Rationales

Tang Li, Mengmeng Ma, and Xi Peng

Paper | Code | Video

  • In Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024. (acceptance rate 25.8%)
ECCV 2024 Strong Double Blind
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DEAL: Disentangle and Localize Concept-level Explanations for VLMs

Tang Li, Mengmeng Ma, and Xi Peng

Paper | Code | Video

  • In Proceedings of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024. (Strong Double Blind, acceptance rate 4.5%)
ICML 2024
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Beyond the Federation: Topology-aware Federated Learning for Generalization to Unseen Clients

Mengmeng Ma, Tang Li, and Xi Peng

Paper | Code | Video

  • In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, 2024. (acceptance rate 27.5%)
CVPR 2023
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Are Data-driven Explanations Robust against Out-of-distribution Data?

Tang Li, Fengchun Qiao, Mengmeng Ma, and Xi Peng

Paper | Code | Video

  • In Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023. (acceptance rate 25.8%)
NeurIPSW 2021 Best Paper Award
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Deep Learning for Spatiotemporal Modeling of Urbanization

Tang Li, Jing Gao, and Xi Peng

Paper | Video | Award

  • In Proceedings of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Workshops on Machine Learning in Public Health (MLPH), 2021. (Best Paper Award)

πŸŽ– Honors and Awards

  • 2025.01 Oral Presentation Award, the Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
  • 2024.10 $2,500 CIS Outstanding Conference Travel Award, University of Delaware.
  • 2024.09 Strong Double Blind Award, European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV).
  • 2024.08 $2,500 CIS Outstanding Conference Travel Award, University of Delaware.
  • 2024.07 $5,000 API credit from the OpenAI Researcher Access Program.
  • 2024.05 Distinguished Graduate Student Award 2024, Computer & Information Sciences, University of Delaware.
  • 2023.03 $1,000 Department Travel Award for Outstanding Conference Publications, University of Delaware.
  • 2022.05 Distinguished Graduate Student Award 2022, Computer & Information Sciences, University of Delaware.
  • 2021.12 Best Paper Award, MLPH Workshop, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

πŸ“– Educations

  • 2020.08 - present, Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA.
  • 2018.08 - 2020.05, Master in Computer Science, George Washington University, Washington D.C., USA.
  • 2013.09 - 2017.06, B.Eng. in Software Engineering, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.

πŸ’¬ Invited Talks

  • 2024.12, the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024. | [video]
  • 2024.09, the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024. | [video]
  • 2023.05, the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023. | [video]
  • 2021.12, MLPH Workshop, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2021. | [video]

πŸ’» Professional Services

Conference and Journal Reviewer

  • Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023-2024.
  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
  • IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023-2025.
  • AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024.
  • IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), 2022.
  • International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS), 2025.
  • British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2024.
  • Remote Sensing (RS), 2022.

DSI Fellow

  • 2022.03 - present, University of Delaware Data Science Institute (DSI), USA.

πŸ‘¨β€πŸ« Teaching

  • CISC 484 (Introduction to Machine Learning), Teaching Assistant, Fall2022.
  • CISC 220 (Data Structure), Teaching Assistant, Fall2023, Spring2024.
  • CISC 108 (Introduction to Computer Science), Teaching Assistant, Fall2020, Spring2021, Fall2021.
  • CISC 181 (Introduction to Computer Science II), Teaching Assistant, Spring2022, Spring2023.