Team leaders
Yifeng Ding (2026)
PhD candidate at UIUC researching LLMs for code generation and repair. Focuses on improving LLM reasoning for software engineering tasks through pre- and post-training. Collaborates with Google and Amazon; published at ICML, NeurIPS, ACL, and EMNLP.
Team members
Zhe Wang (2025-26)
Research focuses on AI for code and LLM post-training. Contributed to the Magicoder project's OSS-INSTRUCT methodology, enabling a 7B parameter model to outperform 16B models. Work accepted at ICML 2024, NeurIPS, and ACL. Previously graduated from Tsinghua University with B.S. in Mathematics and Physics.
Haoyu Zhai (2025-26)
Research focuses on machine learning security, large language models, and AI for security. Examines security of image anonymization techniques using diffusion models and works on adversarial attacks against Code LLMs. Published at IEEE S&P, NeurIPS, and SOUPS.
Xiaona Zhou (2025-26)
Research focuses on cross-modal information retrieval, data-centric machine learning, and time-series anomaly detection. Year-round research intern at Sandia National Laboratories.
Xinzhuo Li (2026)
Electrical and Computer Engineering Master's student at UIUC. Research focuses on reliable AI and vision language models, including mitigating hallucinations in reasoning segmentation models and detecting vulnerabilities in large-scale OS systems.
Faculty advisors
Gang Wang (2025-26)
Associate Professor of Computer Science at UIUC. Research focused on security and machine learning. Recipient of NSF CAREER Award, Amazon Research Award, Google Faculty Research Award, and Best Paper awards at IMWUT, ACM CCS, and SIGMETRICS. Part of NSF ACTION AI Institute and LDOS Expedition Project.
Lingming Zhang (2025-26)
Associate Professor of Computer Science at UIUC. Research at intersection of Software Engineering and Machine Learning. Group has released multiple open code LLMs with millions of downloads worldwide; training techniques widely adopted by leading AI companies. Recipient of ACM SIGSOFT Early Career Researcher Award, NSF CAREER Award, and research awards from Alibaba, Google, Kwai, Meta, and Sams.
Ismini Lourentzou (2025-26)
Assistant Professor in School of Information Sciences at UIUC and director of Perception and LANguage (PLAN) Lab. Research focuses on multimodal machine learning, particularly generative modeling, vision-language models, and multimodal reasoning. Previously Assistant Professor at Virginia Tech where she received Outstanding New Assistant Professor Award.