Towards Trustworthy AI

Dr. Qiongkai Xu is a lecturer at Macquarie University, having earned his PhD from the Australian National University and previously served as a research fellow at the University of Melbourne. His research primarily focuses on Natural Language Processing, Privacy & Security, Machine Learning and Data Mining. Recently, his attention has been directed towards auditing machine learning models, specifically in two areas: 1) identifying and addressing privacy and security issues in ML/NLP models and their applications and 2) developing comprehensive evaluation theory and methods for ML/NLP models from various perspectives.

If you’re passionate about these research topics, I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Email: qiongkai.xu[at]mq.edu.au

Latest News

• [Apr, 2024] Our tutorial: “A Copyright War: Authentication for Large Language Models” is accepted to IJCAI 2024 (Tutorial). See you in Korea!
• [Mar, 2024] “Backdoor Attacks on Multilingual Machine Translation” is accepted to NAACL, the main conference. Congratulations to Jun!
• [Mar, 2024] I am honored to have been appointed as an honorary fellow at the University of Melbourne! PhD and MRes applicants to both MQ and UoM are welcomed.
• [Mar, 2024] “Attacks on Third-Party APIs of Large Language Models” is accepted to SeT-LLM@ICLR 2024.
• [Feb, 2024] I am honored to serve as an Action Editor / Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review!
• [Dec, 2023] Our EMNLP’23 tutorial on Security Challenges in NLP models are now available!
• [Nov, 2023] I am fortunate to have won the Research Pitching Session at Macquarie University!
• [Nov, 2023] I am honored to serve as an Area Chair for LREC-COLING 2024!
• [Oct, 2023] I am excited to become a lecturer (a.k.a assitant professor) at Macquarie University!
• [Oct, 2023] “Mitigating Backdoor Poisoning Attacks through the Lens of Spurious Correlation” is accepted to EMNLP 2023. Congratulations to Xuanli!
• [Oct, 2023] “Boot and Switch: Alternating Distillation for Zero-Shot Dense Retrieval” is accepted to Findings of EMNLP 2023. Congratulations to Fan!
• [Sep, 2023] I am honored to be awarded DAAD Net-AI fellowship, visiting University of Bonn and Leuphana University of Luneburg.
• [Jul, 2023] “Fingerprint Attack: Client De-Anonymization in Federated Learning” is accepted to ECAI 2023 (with acceptance rate 24%).
• [May, 2023] “Rethinking Round-Trip Translation for Machine Translation Evaluation” is accepted to Findings of ACL 2023.
• [Apr, 2023] I will serve as Publication Chair at ALTA 2023. <!– + [Feb, 2023] I will be teaching ‘Text Analytics for Business’ (BUSA90543) this winter semester.
• [Feb, 2023] ‘Security Challenges in Natural Language Processing Models’ is accepted to EMNLP 2023 (Tutorial). See you in Singapore!
• [Jan, 2023] One paper ‘Humanly Certifying Superhuman Classifiers’ is accepted to ICLR’23 (spotlight, notable-top-25%). If you would like to certify a ‘superhuman’ classifier, check our latest paper.
• [Jan, 2023] Congrats to Yujin and Terry! ‘Training-Free Lexical Backdoor attacks on Language Models’ is accepted to WWW’23 (oral, acceptance rate 19.2%). –>

Selected Publications

• Security Challenges in Natural Language Processing Models. Qiongkai Xu, Xuanli He. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP): Tutorial Abstracts, Dec 2023.

• Rethinking Round-Trip Translation for Machine Translation Evaluation, Terry Yue Zhuo, Qiongkai Xu, Xuanli He, Trevor Cohn. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL (Findings-ACL), Jul 2023.

• Humanly Certifying Superhuman Classifiers, Qiongkai Xu, Christian Walder, Chenchen Xu. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), May 2023.

• CATER: Intellectual Property Protection on Text Generation APIs via Conditional Watermarks. Xuanli He, Qiongkai Xu, Yi Zeng, Lingjuan Lyu, Fangzhao Wu, Jiwei Li, Ruoxi Jia. In Proceedings of the 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Nov 2022.

• Student Surpasses Teacher: Imitation Attack for Black-Box NLP APIs. Qiongkai Xu, Xuanli He, Lingjuan Lyu, Lizhen Qu, Gholamreza Haffari. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING), Oct 2022.

• Personal Information Leakage Detection in Conversations. Qiongkai Xu, Lizhen Qu, Zeyu Gao, Gholamreza Haffari. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), Nov 2020.

• Adhering, Steering, and Queering: Treatment of Gender in Natural Language Generation, Yolande Strengers, Lizhen Qu, Qiongkai Xu, Jarrod Knibbe In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), Apr 2020.

• Deep Neural networks for Learning Graph Representations. Shaosheng Cao, Wei Lu, Qiongkai Xu. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Feb 2016.

• GraRep: Learning Graph Representations with Global Structural Information, Shaosheng Cao, Wei Lu, Qiongkai Xu In Proceedings of the 24th ACM international on conference on information and knowledge management (CIKM), Oct 2015.