Me
Xi Ding
Incoming PhD Student @ UW–Madison

About

I am an incoming PhD student in Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Previously, I was a research intern at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where I worked with Prof. Min Xu on trustworthy LLMs/LVLMs and AI4Healthcare/Biomedicine. I also worked as a visiting scholar at the Australian Research Council Research Hub (ARC) with Prof. Yongsheng Gao on interpretable machine learning, and as a research assistant at the TIME Lab at the Australian National University (ANU), advised by Dr. Lei Wang, where I conducted research on video understanding.

Research Passion: I am deeply motivated by the question of how we can design AI systems that not only perform well, but also align with human understanding, operate transparently, and remain robust in high-stakes settings.

With an interdisciplinary background bridging economics and machine learning, I bring a unique analytical perspective to my research, enabling me to approach complex AI problems with both quantitative rigor and structural reasoning. I have published multiple first-author papers, including one at NeurIPS, one at ICLR, one at AAAI, and two in the Companion Proceedings of The Web Conference (WWW), where I received the Best Paper Award. Beyond publishing, I contribute actively to the academic community as a reviewer for conferences like ICLR, AAAI, ICME, and AVSS, and served as a Workshop Coordinator at WWW 2025.

Outside of research, I enjoy basketball, badminton, traveling, and playing guitar. These activities keep me curious, creative, and balanced in both work and life.

I welcome discussions on research problems and am open to collaborations. Feel free to reach out at darcyddx [at] gmail [dot] com.

Interests

  • Trustworthy AI
  • Representation Learning
  • Multimodal Learning
  • LLMs & AI Agents
  • Vision-Language-Action Models
  • ML Interpretability
  • Video Understanding
  • Kernel & Tensor Methods

Education

University of Wisconsin–Madison
  • PhD student in Computer Sciences (Incoming)
Australian National University
  • Master's in Machine Learning
China Agricultural University & University of Colorado Denver
  • Bachelor's in Economics

News

  • I'm excited to join the Computer Sciences PhD program at UW–Madison.
  • Subspace Kernel Learning on Tensor Sequences was accepted at ICLR 2026.
  • I presented my work at NeurIPS 2025 in San Diego, USA.
  • Learning Time in Static Classifiers was accepted at AAAI 2026.
  • Joined the Xu Lab as a research intern at CMU.
  • Received the NeurIPS 2025 Scholar Award.
  • Graph Your Own Prompt was accepted at NeurIPS 2025.
  • Delivered an invited talk Echoes in the Model: When Features Reflect Predictions at the Data61/CSIRO ICVG Reading Group.
  • I presented my works at WWW 2025 in Sydney, Australia.
  • Appointed as an ARC Research Hub visiting scholar.
  • The Journey of Action Recognition won the Best Paper Award at the Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2025.
  • The Journey of Action Recognition was accepted for Oral Presentation at the Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2025.
  • Do Language Models Understand Time? was accepted for Oral Presentation at the Companion Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2025.
  • Joined the TIME Lab as a research assistant at ANU.

Publications

Beyond Medical Diagnostics: How Medical Multimodal Large Language Models Think in Space
Q Trinh*, X Ding*, Y Liu*, Z Qin, X Li, G Durak, H E Aktas, E Keles, U Bagci, M Xu
arXiv 2026
[Paper]
Subspace Kernel Learning on Tensor Sequences
L Wang*, X Ding*, Y Gao, P Koniusz
ICLR 2026
[Paper]
Learning Time in Static Classifiers
X Ding, L Wang, P Koniusz, Y Gao
AAAI 2026
Graph Your Own Prompt
X Ding, L Wang, P Koniusz, Y Gao
NeurIPS 2025
The Journey of Action Recognition
X Ding, L Wang
WWW 2025 Workshop
[Paper] [Award Certificate] [Code]
Oral, Best Paper Award
Do Language Models Understand Time?
X Ding, L Wang
WWW 2025 Workshop
[Paper] [Code]
Oral
Quo Vadis, Anomaly Detection? LLMs and VLMs in the Spotlight
X Ding, L Wang
arXiv 2024
[Paper] [Code]

Selected Honors & Awards

Academic Services

Invited Talk
Topic Host Description Date
Echoes in the Model: When Features Reflect Predictions [slides] Dr. Miaohua Zhang, Data61/CSIRO, Canberra, Australia Data61/CSIRO ICVG Reading Group 08 July 2025
Workshop Coordinating
Workshop Title Workshop Overview Conference Details
TIME 2025: 1st International Workshop on Transformative Insights in Multi-faceted Evaluation [Homepage] Cross-domain knowledge exchange and adaptation, bridging successful methodologies across diverse fields. [Workshop summary] The Web Conference 2025
Sydney, Australia
28 April – 2 May 2025
Conference Reviewer
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)
ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM 2026)
The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2026)
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2026)
IEEE International Conference on Advanced Visual and Signal-Based Systems (AVSS 2025)
IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2025)
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