Calvin Xu

I am a 5th year PhD Student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am focused on making trustworthy machine learning techniques usable in the real world. My research lies at the intersection between ML and formal methods. I am broadly interested in the generation of practical adversarial examples, certified training, and neural network verification for the vision, NLP, and wireless application areas. Recently, I have been working on providing formal guarantees for agentic systems.

I am currently working on a PhD in Computer Science at UIUC advised by Prof. Gagandeep Singh. I was an intern at TikTok in Fall 2024 and at Meta in Summer 2025.

Before my PhD, I spent two years working at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Cybersecurity/ML group. I previously obtained my Masters and Bachelors at Washington University in St. Louis in 2018 where I worked with Prof. Angelina Lee and Prof. Kunal Agrawal.