Dongkuan (DK) Xu
Assistant Professor of Computer Science
NC State University
Seeking 1-2 PhD students for Fall 2027 — I am interested in working with students on efficient learning, reliable AI, and open-ended adaptation. Students from diverse backgrounds are encouraged to reach out. Email "PhD Fall 2027" with your CV.
I'm an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at NC State University, where I lead the Generative Intelligent Computing (GIC) Lab. My research studies learning in open-ended environments—settings in which relevant tasks, hypotheses, solution strategies, and operating conditions can expand or change through interaction. I ask how AI systems should decide what is worth exploring, what the available evidence supports, and what internal models or capabilities should change as new experience accumulates. These coupled questions connect my work on efficient learning, assurance at scale, and continual model evolution.
Selected honors: NC State College of Engineering Dean's Applied AI Research Accelerator Award 2026 · AAAI Best Demonstration Award 2025 · AAAI New Faculty Highlights 2025 · NVIDIA Academic Grant Program Award 2025 · Microsoft Accelerating Foundation Models Research Award 2024. Selected paper distinctions: ICLR 2026 Oral · AAAI 2025 Oral · IROS 2025 Oral · CPAL 2024 Oral · CVPR 2023 Highlight · IEEE IPCCC 2024 Best Paper Runner-Up · ICCCN 2023 Best Paper
I study these questions in digital, scientific, and physical environments where interaction changes both the evidence available to a system and the decisions it should make next. In scientific discovery, this means selecting experiments, interpreting uncertain observations, and revising hypotheses; in embodied systems, it means predicting how actions change a partially observed world and adapting from their consequences. I lead Gentopia and collaborate on SIMBA, OceanAI, MerryQuery, and ArtAlgo. Related collaborations in self-driving materials laboratories and multi-robot systems bring the same scientific questions into autonomous experimentation and physical interaction.
I received my Ph.D. from Penn State in 2022, advised by Xiang Zhang, after completing my M.S. at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences and B.E. at Renmin University of China. I'm organizing the NC State CS AI Seminar Series this year, which brings world-leading researchers across AI, machine learning, and scientific computing to a broader research community.
Outside of work, I'm a fan of American football (Wolfpack, Nittany Lions, Eagles).
News
07/2026
Awarded an NSF CAIG grant ($1,049,875 total across two institutions; Co-PI) to develop physics-informed deep learning for investigating the mechanisms of coastal hypoxia formation link
06/2026
Served as an NSF panelist
06/2026
A paper on domain-adapted LLMs for multi-level network modeling was accepted to IEEE TNSE
05/2026
Organized Wolf AI Summer Bootcamp on modern AI systems for scientific and engineering applications link
05/2026
Congrats to my PhD students Travis and Stephen for receiving CS Graduate Merit Award ($3,000 each)
04/2026
Preprint: SIMBA, an agentic AI platform for single-molecule multidimensional imaging link
04/2026
A paper on robust spatio-temporal modeling for plant growth was accepted to Smart Agric. Technol.
04/2026
Congrats to my undergraduate student Ethan for receiving NC State COE REU Award ($3,000)
04/2026
Co-organized the AI Training Workshop for Water Resources and Environmental Applications at EWRI'26 link
03/2026
Awarded a NC State AI Innovation Summer Project grant ($7.5k; Co-PI) to study human–AI interaction and assessment in creative computing for higher education
03/2026
Served as an NSF panelist
02/2026
Received the Dean's Applied AI Research Accelerator Award ($100k, PI) to advance scalable agentic AI for automated scientific discovery
02/2026
Preprint: Execution-Driven Reasoning Augmentation for Mathematical Problem Solving in LLMs link
02/2026
Preprint: Exploration–Exploitation Optimization for Scalable Dataset Distillation link
02/2026
Preprint: SafeTalkCoach: Diversity-Driven Multi-Agent Simulation for Health Dialogue Generation link
02/2026
Our ICLR'26 paper on adaptive LLM value measurement was selected for an Oral Presentation (top 5%)
02/2026
Invited to serve as New Faculty Highlights Chair at IEEE Big Data'26
02/2026
A paper on unified token compression for joint generation and classification was accepted to CVPR'26
01/2026
A paper on adaptive measurement of LLM value differences was accepted to ICLR'26
01/2026
A paper on project-based AI bias education tools was accepted to CHI'26
01/2026
A paper on deterministic agentic control for Open RAN was accepted to ICC'26
01/2026
A paper on AI as a design partner in creative computing was accepted to ISLS'26
01/2026
01/2026
Served as an NSF panelist
12/2025
Received the NSF NAIRR Pilot Award (PI) to scale trustworthy retrieval-augmented AI systems
12/2025
OceanAI was accepted to the WACV'26 Demo Track
11/2025
Received the CMI Ideation Award ($30k, Co-PI) to pioneer agentic AI for next-generation scientific imaging
11/2025
A paper on multi-scale topological learning for medical image classification was accepted to WACV'26
11/2025
Preprint: Inference-Scaled GraphRAG for Multi-Hop Knowledge Reasoning link
11/2025
Preprint: OceanAI: Retrieval-Grounded Conversational Platform for Trustworthy Scientific Data link
09/2025
Two papers on multimodal reasoning and report generation were accepted to ICDM'25 SAIMBio workshop
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, 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
Served as an NSF panelist
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
Served as an NSF panelist
08/2023
Gave a talk at CoreNet Global: ChatGPT in Corporate Real Estate - Unlocking the Potential link
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
Sponsors
We are very grateful for the valuable support from our sponsors and collaborators:
