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Furong Huang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Specializing in trustworthy machine learning, AI for sequential decision-making, and high-dimensional statistics, Dr. Huang focuses on applying theoretical principles to solve practical challenges in contemporary computing.

Her research centers on creating reliable and interpretable machine learning models that operate effectively in real-world settings. She has also made significant strides in the realm of sequential decision-making, aiming to develop algorithms that not only optimize performance but also adhere to ethical and safety standards.

Academic Positions

  • 2017 - present TTK Assistant Professor

    University of Maryland
    Department of Computer Science

  • 2016-2017 Postdoctoral Researcher

    Microsoft Research NYC
    Mentors: John Langford, Robert Schapire

  • 2010-2016 Doctoral Researcher

    University of California, Irvine
    Advisor: Anima Anandkumar

Recent News

Mar. 2024

Presenter

I gave a talk at Qualcomm AI Security Lecture Series, March 8, 2024. The talk title is "Invisible Foes: Crafting and Cracking AI in the Shadows of Language -- Poison Finetuning Data and Jailbreak Prompts for LLMs".

Feb. 2024

Presenter

I gave a seminar talk at Values-Centered Artificial Intelligence (VCAI) seminar series, College Park, MD, Feb 1, 2024. The talk title is "Algorithmic Fairness in an Ever-Changing World".

Link to the Talk Post
Jan. 2024

New Benchmark Paper

Our Mementos benchmark on testing sequential reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models on image sequences is out. Find the arXiv, github code and data, visualization and leaderboard links at the project page: https://mementos-bench.github.io/. Jan., 2024.

Post on Social Media
Jan. 2024

New Benchmark Paper

Our WAVES benchmark on stress-testing image watermarks is out. Find the arXiv, github code, Hugging Face data, visualization and leaderboard links at the project page: https://wavesbench.github.io/. Jan., 2024.

Post on Social Media
Jan. 2024

Paper Acceptance

10 papers accepted to the main conference of ICLR 2024, 2 as spotlights 8 as posters. For more details, click on the Post on Social Media.

Post on Social Media
Jan. 2024

Organizer

Chair and organizer of NSF-Amazon Fairness in AI Principle Investigator Meeting, Jan 9-10, 2024.

Post on Social Media
Dec. 2023

Paper Acceptance

4 papers accepted to the main conference of NeurIPS 2023 and 11 papers accepted to the workshops of NeurIPS 2023, 1 as oral, 2 as spotlights, and 8 as posters, Sep-Dec 2023.

Post on Social Media
Sep. 2023

Presenter

Depart Colloquium at University of Maryland, College Park, "Trustworthy Machine Learning in an Ever-Changing World," Sep., 2023.

Recording
Jul. 2023

Panelist

Panelist at Interactive Learning with Implicit Human Feedback workshop, ICML, Jul., 2023.

Jul. 2023

Paper Acceptance

3 papers accepted to the main conference and 7 accepted to the workshops at ICML 2023.

Jun. 2023

Keynote Presenter

Keynote speaker at ROADS to Mega-AI Models Workshop, "Efficient Machine Learning at the Edge," MLSys, Jun., 2023.

Jun. 2023

Presenter

Invited talk at the 3rd Workshop of Adversarial Machine Learning on Computer Vision: Art of Robustness, ``Robust Reinforcement Learning in an Ever-Changing World'', CVPR, Jun., 2023.

May 2023

Paper Acceptance

5 papers accepted to main conference at ICLR 2023 (1 of which as a spotlight oral presentation), see this thread of twitter threads  for an introduction of these works. In addition, 2 papers accepted to ICLR workshops 2023.

Post on Social Media
May 2023

Presenter

Invited talk on "Adaptable Reinforcement Learning in An Ever-Changing World” at the the Reincarnating Reinforcement Learning workshop at ICLR 2023. See a recording of the talk below.

Recording
May 2023

Panelist

Panelist at Reincarnating RL workshop, ICLR. May., 2023.

Mar. 2023

Organizer

Co-organizer of NSF-IEEE workshop: Toward Explainable, reliable, and sustainable machine learning in signal & data science, ``Trustworthy Machine Learning in Complex Environments'', Mar. 2023.

Post on Social Media
Mar. 2023

Presenter

Invited talk at 57th Annual Conference on Information Science and Systems, CISS, ``Efficient Machine Learning at the Edge in Parallel'', Mar., 2023.

Feb. 2023

Presenter

Invited talk at 2023 Information Theory and ApplicationsWorkshop, ITA, ``Trustworthy Machine Learning in Complex Environments'', Feb., 2023.

Jan. 2023

Presenter

Invited talk at UTSA Matrix AI Seminar, ``Trustworthy Machine Learning in Complex Environments'', Jan., 2023.

Selected Publications

Beyond Worst-case Attacks: Robust RL with Adaptive Defense via Non-dominated Policies

Spotlight. The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
Liu, Xiangyu, Chenghao Deng, Yanchao Sun, Yongyuan Liang, and Furong Huang
Publisher's website

HallusionBench: An Advanced Diagnostic Suite for Entangled Language Hallucination & Visual Illusion in Large Vision-Language Models

Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.
Guan, Tianrui, Fuxiao Liu, Xiyang Wu, Ruiqi Xian, Zongxia Li, Xiaoyu Liu, Xijun Wang, Lichang Chen, Furong Huang, Yaser Yacoob, Dinesh Manocha, and Tianyi Zhou

Rethinking Adversarial Policies: A Generalized Attack Formulation and Provable Defense in RL

The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
Liu, Xiangyu, Souradip Chakraborty, Yanchao Sun, and Furong Huang
Publisher's website

Game-Theoretic Robust Rein- forcement Learning Handles Temporally-Coupled Perturbations

The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
Liang, Yongyuan, Yanchao Sun, Ruijie Zheng, Xiangyu Liu, Benjamin Eysenbach, Tuomas Sandholm, Furong Huang, and Stephen Marcus McAleer
Publisher's website

SAFLEX: Self-Adaptive Augmentation via Feature Label Extrapolation

The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
Ding, Mucong, Bang An, Yuancheng Xu, Anirudh Satheesh, and Furong Huang
Publisher's website

More Context, Less Distraction: Zero-shot Visual Classification by Inferring and Conditioning on Contextual Attributes

The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
An, Bang, Sicheng Zhu, Michael-Andrei Panaitescu-Liess, Chaithanya Kumar Mummadi, and Furong Huang
Publisher's website

PARL: A Unified Framework for Policy Alignment in Reinforcement Learning

The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
Chakraborty, Souradip, Amrit Bedi, Alec Koppel, Huazheng Wang, Dinesh Manocha, Mengdi Wang, and Furong Huang
Publisher's website

COPlanner: Plan to Roll Out Conservatively but to Explore Optimisti- cally for Model-Based RL

The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024. Project page: https://si0wang.github.io/projects/COPlanner/.
Wang, Xiyao, Ruijie Zheng, Yanchao Sun, Ruonan Jia, Wichayaporn Wongkamjan, Huazhe Xu, Furong Huang
Publisher's website

DrM: Mastering Visual Reinforcement Learning through Dormant Ratio Minimization

Spotlight. The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
Xu, Guowei, Ruijie Zheng, Yongyuan Liang, Xiyao Wang, Zhecheng Yuan, Tianying Ji, Yu Luo, Xiaoyu Liu, Jiaxin Yuan, Pu Hua, Shuzhen Li, Yanjie Ze, Hal Daume III, Furong Huang, and Huazhe Xu
Publisher's website

Like Oil and Water: Group Robustness Methods and Poisoning Defenses Don’t Mix

The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
Panaitescu-Liess, Michael-Andrei, Yigitcan Kaya, Sicheng Zhu, Furong Huang, and Tudor Dumitras
Publisher's website

Decodable and Sample Invariant Continuous Object Encoder

The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024.
Yuan, Dehao, Furong Huang, Cornelia Fermuller, and Yiannis Aloimonos
Publisher's website

C-Disentanglement: Discovering Causally-Independent Generative Factors under an Inductive Bias of Confounder

Neural Information Processing System (NeurIPS), 2023.
Xiaoyu Liu, Jiaxin Yuan, Bang An, Yuancheng Xu, Yifan Yang, Furong Huang

TACO: Temporal Latent Action-Driven Contrastive Loss for Visual Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing System (NeurIPS), 2023.
Ruijie Zheng, Xiyao Wang, Yanchao Sun, Shuang Ma, Jieyu Zhao, Huazhe Xu, Hal Daume, Furong Huang

Large-Scale Distributed Learning via Private On-Device LSH

Neural Information Processing System (NeurIPS), 2023.
Tahseen Rabbani, Marco Bornstein, Furong Huang

Cold Diffusion: Inverting Arbitrary Image Transforms Without Noise

Neural Information Processing System (NeurIPS), 2023.
Arpit Bansal, Eitan Borgnia, Hong-Min Chu, Jie S. Li, Hamid Kazemi, Furong Huang, Micah Goldblum, Jonas Geiping, Tom Goldstein

Live in the Moment: Learning Dynamics Model Adapted to Evolving Policy

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023.
Xiyao Wang, Wichayaporn Wongkamjan, Furong Huang
Publisher's website

STEERING: Stein Information Directed Exploration for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023.
Souradip Chakraborty, Amrit Singh Bedi, Alec Koppel, Mengdi Wang, Furong Huang, Dinesh Manocha
Publisher's website

Learning Unforeseen Robustness from Out-of-distribution Data Using Equivariant Domain Translator

International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023.
Sicheng Zhu, Bang An, Furong Huang, Sanghyun Hong

Certifiably Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning against Adversarial Communication

The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023.
Yanchao Sun, Ruijie Zheng, Parisa Hassanzadeh, Yongyuan Liang, Soheil Feizi, Sumitra Ganesh, Furong Huang
Publisher's website

Is Model Ensemble Necessary? Model-based RL via a Single Model with Lipschitz Regularized Value Function

The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2023.
Ruijie Zheng, Xiyao Wang, Huazhe Xu, Furong Huang
Publisher's website

Selected Awards

MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Asia Pacific 2022

Visionaries

She makes AI more trustworthy by developing models that can perform tasks safely and efficiently in unseen environments without human oversight.

AI Researcher of the Year 2022

Finalist of AI in Research – AI researcher of the year, 2022 Women in AI Awards North America.

 

Special Jury Recognition – United States, 2022 Women in AI Awards North America.

National Science Foundation Awards

NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII), “Principled Methods for Learning and Understanding of Neural Networks.”

NSF Div Of Information & Intelligent Systems (IIS) Direct For CISE, “FAI: Toward Fair Decision Making and Resource Allocation with Application to AI-Assisted Graduate Admission and Degree Completion.”

JP Morgan Faculty Research Award 2022, 2020 & 2019

JP Morgan Faculty Research Award 2022, “Repelling Security Vulnerabilities in AI-augmented Financial Decision-Making Systems”.

JP Morgan Faculty Research Award 2020, “Robust, Private and Fair ML for Financial Models”.

JP Morgan Faculty Research Award 2019, “Methods to Identify Communities and Trading Behavior over Financial Data Streams”.

Adobe Faculty Research Award 2017

Adobe Faculty Research Award 2017, “Understanding User Features with Text, Social and Behavior Data through Deep Tensor Neural Network Learning”.

Research Projects

My research stands at the forefront, focusing on robustness, efficiency, and fairness in AI/ML models, vital in fostering an era of Trustworthy AI that society can rely on. My research fortifies models against spurious features, adversarial perturbations, and distribution shifts, enhances model, data, and learning efficiency, and ensures long-term fairness under distribution shifts.

With academic and industrial collaborators, my research has been used for cataloguing brain cell types, learning human disease hierarchy, designing non-addictive pain killers, controlling power-grid for resiliency, defending against adversarial entities in financial markets, updating/finetuning industrial-scale model efficiently and etc.

Specific Area of Research

Click Below

Recent Posts

Contact Me

furongh at cs.umd.edu
301.405.8010
furong-huang.com

4124 The Brendan Iribe Center
Department of Computer Science
Center for Machine Learning
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20740