Sihong Xie 谢思泓
Associate Professor (with tenure)
AI Thrust, Information Hub, HKUST(GZ)
Room W4-303, Nansha, Guangzhou, China
Email: xie.sihong@gmail.com / sihongxie@hkust-gz.edu.cn
CV (last updated Jun 20, 2026) Google Scholar GitHub
Dr. Sihong Xie is a tenured Associate Professor at the AI Thrust, Information Hub of HKUST(GZ) — a young, research-intensive university established in 2022 under the "Guangzhou Redwood" initiative. He is the director of the Trustworthy AI Exploration (ExRAIL) Lab and the Executive Deputy Director of the HKUST(GZ)-Guangdong Unicom Joint Computing Lab.
He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2016, advised by Prof. Philip S. Yu, and B.S. and M.S. from the School of Software Engineering at Sun Yat-Sen University (2004, 2008). Before joining HKUST-GZ, he was a faculty member at Lehigh University's CSE department (2016–2023), where he was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2023.
His research focuses on trustworthy machine learning — including explainability, uncertainty quantification, fairness, robustness, and reliability — with applications in graph learning, language models, and multi-agent systems. He has published 130+ papers in top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, KDD, ACL, CVPR, CIKM, ICDM, WSDM) with 3,100+ citations and an h-index of 24.
He is the recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2022) and the 国家自然科学基金优秀青年科学基金项目（海外） (2024). He serves on the executive committees of ACM SIGSPATIAL China, CCF-AI, and CCF-BigData.
Research Interests
Trustworthy AI
Explainability, uncertainty quantification, fairness, robustness, and reliability in machine learning systems.
Graph Neural Networks
Reliable graph learning, graph-based multi-agent reinforcement learning, and graph foundation models.
LLM Faithfulness
Ensuring large language models produce faithful, grounded, and verifiable outputs.
RL for Navigation
Reinforcement learning for autonomous navigation and path-planning in complex environments.
Crowdsourcing & Human-in-the-Loop
Truth discovery, crowdsourced data quality, and interactive machine learning with human feedback.
News
| May 1, 2026 | ICML 2026 Four papers accepted to ICML 2026. Congrats to Yazheng, Rui, Rufeng and Chenhua! |
| Apr 29, 2026 | One paper accepted to IJCAI 2026. Congrats to Zhaofan! |
| Jan 24, 2026 | Invited talk at CAAI-JudicialAI conference (slides). |
| Nov 8, 2025 | One paper accepted to AAAI 2026. Congrats to Yi Wang! |
| Sep 18, 2025 | One paper accepted to NeurIPS 2025. Congrats to Yazheng! |
| Jul 27, 2025 | One paper presented at ACL 2025. Congrats to Xiaqiang! |
| Apr 24–28, 2025 | Attended ICLR 2025 with PhD student authors in Singapore. |
| Apr 17–19, 2025 | Attended ACM SIGSPATIAL China ID Meeting 2025 in Xiamen. |
| Mar 28, 2025 | AI Thrust undergraduate program promotion. |
| Mar 20, 2025 | Welcome Yue Chang joining ExRAIL as a PhD student. |
| Mar 11, 2025 | Gave a tutorial on DeepSeek. |
| Feb 25, 2025 | One paper presented at AAAI 2025. Congrats to Xiaqiang! |
| Jan 23, 2025 | Two papers (explainable AI and conformal prediction) accepted to ICLR 2025. See you in Singapore in April! |
| Dec 12, 2024 | Talk on reliable graph learning at Hong Kong. |
| Nov 29, 2024 | Talk at School of AI, Jilin University on reliable graph learning. Slides. |
| Sep 26, 2024 | Three papers accepted to NeurIPS 2024. |
| Sep 22, 2024 | Talk on reliable graph-based MARL at ACM SIGSPATIAL China conference. |
| Sep 6, 2024 | One paper accepted to ICDM 2024. |
| Aug 25, 2024 | Elected into the committee of CIPS BigSearch. |
| Aug 22, 2024 | Invited talk at Shandong University. |
| Aug 9, 2024 | Elected into the executive committee of CCF-BigData. |
| Jul 28, 2024 | Elected into the executive committee of CCF-AI. |
| Jun 14, 2024 | Invited talk at Anhui University. |
| Apr 25, 2024 | Elected into the executive committee of ACM SIGSPATIAL China. |
| Apr 20, 2024 | Awarded a Tencent Rhino-bird grant to study anomaly detection on large-scale graphs. Thank Tencent and collaborators! |
| Feb 20, 2024 | Welcome Zhaofan Zhang and Jiujiu Chen joining as PhD students. |
| Feb 20, 2024 | Welcome Xiangrong Liao joining as a MPhil student. |
| Nov 30, 2023 | Welcome Xiaqiang Tang joining as a research intern. |
| Nov 24, 2023 | Welcome Wenqi Qiu, Hui Wu, Zhiran Luo, Tianchuang Bai, and Xingyuan Chen joining as MPhil students. |
| Nov 14, 2023 | Welcome Rufeng Chen joining as a PhD student. |
| Aug 1, 2023 | Welcome Yazheng Liu and Rui Xu joining as PhD students. |
Group
I lead the Trustworthy AI Exploration (ExRAIL) Lab. Currently the group includes 7 PhD students, 4 MPhil students, and 7 undergraduate researchers, working on trustworthy ML, graph learning, and reinforcement learning.