Dongkuan (DK) Xu

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).