I am a Ph.D. candidate 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 Interpretable 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, ICML, ECCV, AAAI, etc.

🔥 News

• 2025.05: Passed my Ph.D. Dissertation Proposal defense.  🎉🎉
• 2025.03: I will join the Amazon Brand Protection team as summer intern in June.

📝 Publications

ICML 2025

“Why Is There a Tumor?”: Tell Me the Reason, Show Me the Evidence

Mengmeng Ma, Tang Li, and Xi Peng

Paper | Code

• In Proceedings of the International Conference on Machine Learning, 2025. (acceptance rate 26.9%)

AAAI 2025 Oral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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)

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2025.05 Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award 2025, University of Delaware.
• 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).

📖 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.

💬 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]

💻 Professional Services

Conference and Journal Reviewer

• Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023-2025.
• International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
• IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2023-2025.
• International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 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), 2024-2025.
• Remote Sensing (RS), 2022.

DSI Fellow

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

👨‍🏫 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.