Dongkuan (DK) Xu
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
NC State University
Seeking 1-2 PhD students for Fall 2026 — Encouraging candidates from underrepresented groups. Email "PhD Fall 2026" with your CV.
I am an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at NC State University, where I lead the Generative Intelligent Computing (GIC) Lab. My research focuses on machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision, with an emphasis on efficient and reliable agentic AI systems.
I received several awards, including the AAAI Best Demonstration Award 2025, the Best Poster Award at AAAI 2025 Spring Symposium on GenAI@Edge, the AAAI New Faculty Highlights 2025, the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award 2025, the Microsoft Accelerating Foundation Models Research Award 2024, the NCSU Carla Savage Award 2024, the Best Paper Award Runner-Up at IEEE IPCCC 2024, and the Best Paper Award at ICCCN 2023.
I hold my Ph.D. from Penn State, M.S. from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and B.E. from Renmin University of China.
I am also involved in MARINA, a research initiative at the intersection of AI and ocean sciences, focusing on advancing ocean modeling, environmental monitoring, and AI-driven scientific discovery. As part of my broader work on AI systems, I have contributed to the development of Synthora and Gentopia.
Outside of work, I am a fan of American football (Nittany Lions, Eagles, Cowboys) and enjoy working out and playing soccer.
News
09/2025
Awarded a grant from the NSF ExLENT program ($1M, Co-PI) to advance trustworthy & scalable generative AI for augmenting teaching and learning in in-service contexts
08/2025
Congratulations to Noah for receiving the NCSU COE REU Award ($3k).
08/2025
Awarded a grant from the DELTA Grants Programs to scale and evaluate trustworthy LLM agents for education
08/2025
Our work on AI single-molecule imaging denoising was featured as the cover article in Analytical Chemistry
06/2025
A paper on non-overlap-aware pose estimation for multi-robot perception was accepted as an oral to IROS'25
06/2025
Keynote speakers for the 2nd DCgAA workshop at DAC'25 were announced: Peter A. Beerel (USC), Yiran Chen (Duke), Tulika Mitra (NUS), David Z. Pan (UT Austin), Yizhou Sun (UCLA)
06/2025
We launched ArtAlgo [[link]](https://hi-art-algo.dk-lab.xyz/), a creative coding platform for generating visual art through code and AI
05/2025
The website for our NSF project EcoTern is now live link
05/2025
The website for our 2nd DCgAA workshop @DAC'25 is now live link
05/2025
Congrats to my undergraduate students Aditya and Noah for being selected to present at NC State's 34th Annual Spring Undergraduate Research & Creativity Symposium
05/2025
Noah received a Project Supply Grant from the NC State Office of Undergraduate Research ($1400)
05/2025
A paper on tool-augmented LLM agents for multi-modal causal discovery was accepted to ACL'25
05/2025
A paper on achieving real-time vision Transformers on mobile was accepted to IJCV
05/2025
A paper on augmenting LLMs for HPC I/O performance diagnosis was accepted to SSDBM'25
05/2025
A paper on generative AI-driven design for communication systems was accepted to IEEE Comm. Magazine
04/2025
Gave talks at SAS and NCSU MSE Department: Building Scalable and Efficient Agentic AI Systems
04/2025
News about our AAAI-2025 Best Demonstration Award link
04/2025
Received the Best Poster Award at the AAAI 2025 Spring Symposium on GenAI@Edge
03/2025
Awarded an internal grant from the TELS Department for AI-powered creative computing research
03/2025
Awarded a grant from the NVIDIA Academic Grant Program for networked scientific simulation research
03/2025
Aditya received NCSU COE REU Award ($3k)
03/2025
MerryQuery won the AAAI-2025 Best Demonstration Award
03/2025
Our 2nd workshop on deep learning-hardware co-design for GenAI acceleration was accepted at DAC'25
02/2025
The I/O Navigator Demo v1 link, developed w/ UDel, OSU, LBNL and NCSU, is available
02/2025
Our work Adaptix, training-free accelerated LLM speculative decoding, was selected for an Oral at AAAI'25
01/2025
Our work IOAgent, LLM-powered I/O performance diagnosis for HPC storage, was accepted to IPDPS'25
01/2025
Noah's (undergraduate) work on LLM bias evaluation was accepted at NCUR'25
01/2025
Gave a talk at ABB Research Center: Advancing Real-World Edge Intelligence
12/2024
Selected for the AAAI New Faculty Highlights 2025
12/2024
Awarded a grant from the NC State Data Science and AI Academy as a Co-PI to support research on developing responsible LLM agents for enhancing access to large environmental datasets link
12/2024
Our work on adaptive accelerated LLM decoding was accepted to AAAI'25
12/2024
Our tutorial, Resource-Efficient Learning for the Web, has been accepted by TheWebConf'25
11/2024
Our paper on network-oriented LLMs won Best Paper Award Runner-Up at IPCCC'24
11/2024
MerryQuery was accepted to AAAI'25 (Demo Track)
11/2024
Noah had her research accepted by the AAAI'25 Undergraduate Consortium
11/2024
Talks at Purdue ECE-570 and NCSU DSC-595: Building Reliable Cost-Effective Sparse Models
11/2024
Our GenAI@Edge Symposium was accepted at the AAAI 2025 Spring Symposium Series
11/2024
Our workshop, RelWeb link, was accepted at TheWebConf'25
09/2024
Paper on black-box LLM-generated text detection was accepted to NeurIPS'24
09/2024
Noah received the Federal Work-Study Award ($1,000)
09/2024
Will attend the 2024 Oak Ridge Lab's Core Universities AI Workshop. See you in Raleigh
09/2024
Gave a talk at ABB Research Center, US: Agentic LLM Diagnostic Chatbot for SAP Manufacturing
08/2024
Noah received COE REU Award ($3,000)
08/2024
A paper on integrating LLMs with network simulators for script-free simulations was accepted to IPCCC'24
08/2024
Awarded a grant from the NSF CyberTraining program as a Co-PI to support AI-driven, cross-disciplinary training for sustainable environmental science research link
08/2024
Will attend the NSF CSSI/CyberTraining/SCIPE PI Meeting 2024. See you in Charlotte
07/2024
Will attend the NSF Workshop on Sustainable Computing 2024. See you at Purdue
07/2024
07/2024
Keynote speakers for RelKD workshop at KDD'24 were announced: Derek Cheng (Google DeepMind), Hanghang Tong (UIUC), Jing Gao (Purdue)
07/2024
A paper on algorithm-hardware co-design for real-time vision Transformer was accepted to CODES+ISSS'24
07/2024
A paper on accelerating diffusion generative models via adaptive computation was accepted to ECCV'24
06/2024
Awarded a grant from the NSF HEGS program as a Co-PI to support research on multimodal data analysis of neighborhood dynamics link
06/2024
Received a Gift Fund from Microsoft
06/2024
Successfully concluded our 3rd workshop on integrating Large Language Models into K-12 classrooms News
06/2024
Our research work on black-box LLM detection is available link
06/2024
Our research work on scaling LLM with massive tools is available link
05/2024
Keynote speakers for DCgAA workshop at DAC'24 were announced: Andreas Andreou (JHU), Farinaz Koushanfar (UCSD), Massoud Pedram (USC), Vijay Janapa Reddi (Harvard), Zhibin Xiao (CASPA)
05/2024
A paper on digital twin-assisted reliable edge caching for wireless networks was accepted to IEEE JSAC (IF=16.4)
04/2024
Will mentor Wake STEM Early College High School students in GCSP-REU Summer Program 2024
04/2024
A paper on big model alignment was accepted to IJCAI'24 Survey Track
04/2024
A paper on LLM-powered code comprehension was accepted to IJCAI'24
04/2024
A paper on diffusion model-augmented wireless networks was accepted to IFIP/IEEE Networking'24
04/2024
Invited to serve on the NSF Core Program panel
03/2024
The 2nd Workshop on Resource-Efficient Learning for Knowledge Discovery was accepted to KDD'24
03/2024
Gave a talk at NCSU Forest Carbon Solutions Initiative: Foundation Models for Geospatial Analytics
03/2024
Gave a talk at Fo Guang Shan Buddhist Temple link: Impact of AI on Our Lives and Beyond News, in Chinese
03/2024
A paper on reliable sparse training was accepted to Transactions on Machine Learning Research
03/2024
Received the Carla Savage Award News
02/2024
A paper on explaining predictions made by graph neural networks was accepted to IEEE PAMI (IF=23.6)
02/2024
Workshop on Deep Learning-Hardware Co-Design for Generative AI Acceleration was accepted to DAC'24
02/2024
Our DDCV workshop@CVPR'24 is looking for submissions. We will offer 3 free registration for students!
01/2024
Awarded a grant from the Microsoft Accelerating Foundation Models Research Award News
01/2024
Our proposal of The 1st Workshop on Dataset Distillation for Computer Vision was accepted to CVPR'24
12/2023
Gave a talk at STARS AI Scholars Program: How LLMs Work and Cutting-Edge Research on Generative AI
12/2023
A paper on large language model education was accepted to AAAI/EAAI'24
12/2023
A paper on neural architecture search for Spiking Transformers was accepted to ICASSP'24
10/2023
Gentopia was accepted to EMNLP'23 (System Demo)
10/2023
Two papers (Robust LLM Pruning + Controllable Randomized Pruning) were accepted to EMNLP'23
10/2023
A paper on code generation in domain-changing environments was accepted to EMNLP'23 Pan-DL Workshop
09/2023
A paper on personalized federated learning was accepted to NeurIPS'23
09/2023
My mentored undergraduate, Zihan, received COE REU Award ($3,000). Congrats Zihan.
09/2023
Gave a talk at Microsoft Research Asia: Sculpting the Future of Collective Growth in Collaborative AI
09/2023
Invited to serve as an Area Chair for LREC-COLING'24
08/2023
Invited to serve on the NSF CAREER panel
08/2023
Gave a talk at CoreNet Global: ChatGPT in Corporate Real Estate - Unlocking the Potential [[link]](https://sites.google.com/ncsu.edu/chatgptrealestate/home)
08/2023
Released a paper providing more details about Gentopia.AI
08/2023
Launched Gentopia.AI. Check out our teams from NCSU, GMU, CMU, UMich, etc.
07/2023
Honored to receive the Best Paper Award at ICCCN'23
07/2023
A paper was accepted to ICCV'23
07/2023
A paper was accepted to CDC'23
06/2023
Invited to serve as a Senior PC member of AAAI'24
05/2023
A paper was accepted to KDD'23
05/2023
A paper was accepted to ACL'23
04/2023
Our work, E-App, was accepted to ICCCN'23. See u in Honolulu
04/2023
A paper was accepted to ICAIBD'23. Congrats to our undergrad, Zihan
03/2023
Will co-chair RelKD'23: Resource-Efficient Learning for Knowledge Discovery Workshop @KDD'23
02/2023
Two papers on accelerating data/model learning were accepted to CVPR'23. Stay tuned ;-)
02/2023
Two papers on dynamic training were accepted to DAC'23
01/2023
Our work, Efficient Informed Proposals for Discrete Distributions, was accepted to AISTATS'23
01/2023
Invited to give a talk at Rutgers EFficient AI (REFAI) Seminar on Feb 16, 2023
12/2022
Invited to serve as a journal reviewer for TPAMI and Communications of the ACM
11/2022
Invited to serve as the PC Chair for MLNLP 2022
11/2022
Two papers were accepted to AAAI'23. See you in DC in February
10/2022
Invited to serve as a TPC member for ISQED'23
09/2022
Will chair The First Workshop on DeepLearning-Hardware Co-Design for AI Acceleration with AAAI'23
09/2022
Our work, AutoDistil (paper), was accepted to NeurIPS'22
09/2022
Invited to give a talk at the CIS Department of the University of Macau