Calvin Xu

Calvin Xu

Changming Xu (徐沧溟)

Computer Science PhD Candidate
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

I am a 4th 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 LLM reasoning/efficiency and the using LLMs to improve classification.

I am currently working on a PhD in Computer Science at UIUC advised by Prof. Gagandeep Singh. In the Fall semester of 2024, I was an intern at TikTok in Xinghai Hu's Responsible Recommendation Systems team working with Jiachen Sun working on VLM's for content Safety. I am currently an intern at Meta.

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.

Side Projects

  • WhereAmI - Create location guessing games with your own pictures or choose from a list of curated images
  • 24++ - An upgraded version of 24 where the goal is to create 3-digit numbers with (+,-,/,*) operations and 7 cards
  • [In Development] - An agentic AI powered latex editor