Prof Xiaowei Huang

Department of Computer Science,
University of Liverpool,
Ashton Street,
Liverpool, L69 3BX
United Kingdom

Office: Ashton Building, Room 222
Phone: (+44) 1517954282
Mobile: (+44) 7831378101
Email: xiaowei.huang at liverpool.ac.uk, xiaowei.huang at live.com



I am Professor of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. Prior to Liverpool, I worked at the University of Oxford, the University of New South Wales, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Research Interests:

The research my group is currently conducting spans over machine learning, formal methods, and robotics. If you are interested in these areas and want to collaborate with us, please feel free to get in touch. Most of my research publications can be found through my Google Scholar profile.

Specifically, we are interested in analysing autonomous systems -- systems that can learn, adapt, and make decisions by themselves -- in terms of their properties (e.g., safety, robustness, trustworthiness, security, etc), to understand if they are applicable to safety critical applications, and constructing autonomous systems with these properties satisfied. This may include (but not limited to)

Currently, the application areas we are addressing include self-driving cars, underwater vehicles, and other robotics applications. We are also interested in various healthcare applications where safety and interpretability are important. The research my group is doing is summarised (incompletely) in the slides as well as in the "Research" tab of this webpage.

I am co-chairing AISafety workshops at IJCAI, and SafeAI workshops at AAAI, since 2019, and am co-organising Turing interest group on Neuro-Symbolic AI.

I am directing the Autonomous Cyber Physical Systems Laboratory, which is now located at the new Digital Innovation Facility (DIF) Building.

The research has been funded by Dstl, EPSRC, European Commission, Innovate UK, etc. I have been the PI (or Liverpool PI) for projects valued more than £2M, and co-I for more than £15M. Some brief information can be found here.

I am on the role of school research lead of the EEECS school.

I led a team won the UK-US privacy-enhancing technologies prize challenges at the first stage and a special recognition prize on "Novel Modelling/Design" at the second stage.

Book "Machine Learning Safety" has been published.














The following are a few video demos of our research:

For Prospective Students:

I am always looking for PhD students with strong motivation to actively participate in research. There are a few possible ways of receiving a scholarship, for example If you have other means of supporting your study, you are also welcomed to get in touch.

New Open Positions:

Workshop Organisation

Recent News

Teaching for this semester





We entail in the following several research directions that we have fostered or contributed in the past years. We use [Journal Name, Year] to denote a journal publication and [ConferenceAbbreviation+Year] to denote a conference paper.


Safety and Trustworthiness of AI Systems

References: [Machine Learning Safety, Springer 2023], [ArXiv, 2023a], [ICFEM2022], [AI Communications, 2022], [CIKM2021], [Robotics, 2021], [Computer Survey Review, 2020]


Verification of Neural Networks and Learning-Enabled Systems

References: [AAAI2024b], [IJCAI2023], [IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2023b], [PAKDD2023], [IROS2022a], [Formal Aspect of Computing, 2021], [ICANN2021], [Theoretical Computer Sciences, 2020], [FSE2020], [IROS2020], [IJCAI2019], [SAS2019], [TACAS2018], [IJCAI2018a], [CAV2017]


Falsification (Testing, Attacks) of Neural Networks

References: [ACL2023], [ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2023], [Machine Learning, 2023], [IEEE Transactions on Reliability, 2022], [ECCV2022], [Machine Learning, 2021], [ICDM2020], [ICRA2020], [ICSE2019a], ["ICSE2019b], [ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, 2019], [ArXiv, 2018], [ASE2018], [AAAI-24]


Enhancements to Neural Networks (Adversarial Training, Uncertainty Quantification)

References: [AAAI2024c], [CVPR2023], [IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters,2023a], [Transactions of Machine Learning Research, 2022], [CVPR2022], [IROS2022b], [ICCV2021], [NeurIPS2020].


Explanation (XAI) of Neural Networks

References: [ICCV2023], [UAI2021], [ECCV2020a]


Aassurance of Neural Networks and Learning-Enabled Systems

References: [ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2023], [ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems, 2023], [ITSC2023], [DSN2021], [SafeCOMP2020]


Large Language Models and Other Generative AI Models

References: [AAAI2024a], [ACL2023], [ArXiv, 2023b], [ArXiv, 2023a]


Energy Efficiency of Neural Networks

References: [ArXiv 2023b], [ArXiv, 2023a], [Frontier in Neuroscience, 2022]


Applications of AI

References: [AAMAS2023], [ACMMM2023], [IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 2023], [Pattern Recognition, 2022], [KR2022], [AAMAS2022], [BMVC2021], [IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, 2021], [ECCV2020b], [MICCAI2020], [IROS2019]


Logic Reasoning about Multiagent Systems (Strategy, Knowledge, Cognitive Trust, etc)

References: ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 2019], [ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, 2018], [IJCAI2018b], [AAAI2017], [IJCAI2017], [AAAI2016a], [AAAI2016b], [IJCAI2016a], [IJCAI2016b], [Artificial Ingelligence, 2015], [IJCAI2015], [TACAS2014], [AAAI2014], [KR2014], [AAMAS2013a], [AAMAS2013b], [AAMAS2013c], [AAAI2012a], [AAAI2012b], [IJCAI2011], [AAMAS2010], [ECAI2010].





Software:

Publications:

Google Scholar and dblp

TrustAI: Tool Demos

DeepConcolic (Github repository)


Related Publications:

Reliability validation of a learning-enabled dynamic tracking system (Github repository)


Related Publications:

PRODeep : a platform for robustness verification of deep neural networks (Github repository)


Related Publications:

testRNN (Github repository)


Related Publications:

Funding & Grants





Program Committee Memberships

Key Departmental Administrative Roles





Recent Invited Talks, Seminars, and Panel Discussions:





Open Positions:

Postdocs or graduate research associates in the project where I was/am the primary investigator

Supervision of Postgraduate Research Students as primary supervisor

If you are interested in doing a PhD in relevant reserach areas with me, please feel free to contact me. University of Liverpool has a set of established scholarship schemes, including Liverpool china scholarship council award and Sir Joseph Rotblat Alumni Scholarship. Additional to these, I may have some vacancies from time to time.

Visitors:





"Robotics and Artificial Intelligence" Reading group is to hold a weekly meeting where one of the members will have a 30-40 minutes talk, discussing either their own papers, papers from other research groups, or anything that they are interested in. This will be followed by a Q&A and discussion session among the group on the topic.

Membership:

Anyone can join by request. If you are interested in, please feel free to drop me a message.

Venue:

Due to the lockdown, we are mainly holding this through virtual meetings (please click: Zoom meeting).

Meeting time:

Starting from the week of 24th August, the meeting time is moved to Tuesday 11:00-12:00, London time.

Talk Schedule:

Please refer to the webpage at ACPS lab for the detailed information about the reading group.