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Xun Xian

10 accepted papers

2026

Ice Cream Doesn’t Cause Drowning: Benchmarking LLMs Against Statistical Pitfalls in Causal Inference

ICLR 2026poster

Reliable causal inference is essential for making decisions in high-stakes areas like medicine, economics, and public policy. However, it remains unclear whether large language models (LLMs) can handle rigorous and trustworthy \textit{statistical causal inference}. Current benchmarks usually involve…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AssistedDS: Benchmarking How External Domain Knowledge Assists LLMs in Automated Data Science

EMNLP 2025

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced the automation of data science workflows. Yet it remains unclear whether they can critically leverage external domain knowledge as human data scientists do in practice. To answer this question, we introduce AssistedDS (Assisted Data Science), a benchmark de

2025

On the Vulnerability of Applying Retrieval-Augmented Generation within Knowledge-Intensive Application Domains

ICML 2025poster

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been empirically shown to enhance the performance of large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive domains such as healthcare, finance, and legal contexts. Given a query, RAG retrieves relevant documents from a corpus and integrates them into the LLMs’…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Demystifying Poisoning Backdoor Attacks from a Statistical Perspective

ICLR 2024poster

Backdoor attacks pose a significant security risk to machine learning applications due to their stealthy nature and potentially serious consequences. Such attacks involve embedding triggers within a learning model with the intention of causing malicious behavior when an active trigger is present whi…

2024

RAW: A Robust and Agile Plug-and-Play Watermark Framework for AI-Generated Images with Provable Guarantees

NeurIPS 2024poster

Safeguarding intellectual property and preventing potential misuse of AI-generated images are of paramount importance. This paper introduces a robust and agile plug-and-play watermark detection framework, referred to as RAW. As a departure from existing encoder-decoder methods, which incorporate fix…

2023

A Unified Detection Framework for Inference-Stage Backdoor Defenses

NeurIPS 2023poster

Backdoor attacks involve inserting poisoned samples during training, resulting in a model containing a hidden backdoor that can trigger specific behaviors without impacting performance on normal samples. These attacks are challenging to detect, as the backdoored model appears normal until activated…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

Understanding Backdoor Attacks through the Adaptability Hypothesis

ICML 2023poster

A poisoning backdoor attack is a rising security concern for deep learning. This type of attack can result in the backdoored model functioning normally most of the time but exhibiting abnormal behavior when presented with inputs containing the backdoor trigger, making it difficult to detect and prev…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2022

Mismatched Supervised Learning

ICASSP 2022accepted

Supervised learning scenarios, where labels and features are possibly mismatched, have been an emerging concern in machine learning applications. For example, researchers often need to align heterogeneous data from multiple resources to the same entities without a unique identifier in the socioecono…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Assisted Learning: A Framework for Multi-Organization Learning

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

In an increasing number of AI scenarios, collaborations among different organizations or agents (e.g., human and robots, mobile units) are often essential to accomplish an organization-specific mission. However, to avoid leaking useful and possibly proprietary information, organizations typically en…

Cited by 53SourcePDFScholar