I am currently Ph.D student of Computer Science at North Carolina State University, where I am fortunately advised by Prof. Xiaorui Liu. Prior to that, I got my M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics at Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinease Academy of Sciences, advised by Lingyun Wu. I received my B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics at Beijing Normal University, where I was advised by Huajie Chen and Li Cui.

I have several research experiences in industry, including Amazon GuardDuty, Baidu, Inc., Tsinghua AIR, and AiQuant.

I am a big fan of basketball and I idolize Chris Paul and Allen Iverson. Our team won two champions in basketball match in BNU.

💗 Research Interests

  • Adversarial Robustness on Vision, Language, and Graphs
  • Graph Neural Networks
  • AI for Science

🔥 News

  • 2024.11:  📖 New preprint: Exploring the Potentials and Challenges of Using Large Language Models for the Analysis of Transcriptional Regulation of Long Non-coding RNAs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03522
  • 2024.10:  🎉 One paper is accepted by IEEE BigData 2024.
  • 2024.10:  💻 I give a tutorial at DSAA about “Adversarial Robustness in Graph Neural Networks”.
  • 2024.10:  📖 New preprint: Robustness Reprogramming for Representation Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04577
  • 2024.09:  🎉 Three papers are accepted by NeurIPS 2024. See you in Vancouver!
  • 2024.08:  📖 I will serve as a reviwer of ICLR 2025.
  • 2024.07:  🎉 I receive the National AI Research Resource Pilot Award for our research on exploring and enhancing the robustness of LLMs and foundation models.
  • 2024.05:  💻 I join Amazon AWS GuardDuty as an Applied Scientist intern at NYC.
  • 2024.05:  🎉 Our tutorial on “Adversarial Robustness in Graph Neural Networks” is accepted by DSAA 2024. See you in San Diego!
  • 2024.05:  🎉 I receive the Summer Graduate Merit Awards.
  • 2024.03:  🎉 One paper is accepted by ICLR 2024 Workshop on Reliable and Responsible Foundation Models.
  • 2024.02:  🎉 One paper is accepted by Briefings in Bioinformatics.
  • 2023.09:  🎉 One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2023. See you in New Orleans!
  • 2023.09:  🎉 One paper is accepted by BMC Bioinformatics.
  • 2023.06:  💻 I join Big Search team in Baidu, Inc. as a research intern at Beijing.
  • 2022.03:  💻 I join Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University as a research intern.

📝 Publications

As a researcher with a background in both Mathematics and AI, I am deeply engaged in developing robustness-informed neural networks using robust statistics and optimization theories. Feel free to explore my publications contributing to this topic in various domains:

NeurIPS 2024
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ProTransformer: Robustify Transformers via Plug-and-Play Paradigm

Zhichao Hou, Weizhi Gao, Yuchen Shen, Feiyi Wang, Xiaorui Liu

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

NeurIPS 2024
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Robust Graph Neural Networks via Unbiased Aggregation

Zhichao Hou, Ruiqi Feng, Tyler Derr, Xiaorui Liu

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

Preprint 2024
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Robustness Reprogramming for Representation Learning

Zhichao Hou, MohamadAli Torkamani, Hamid Krim, Xiaorui Liu

Preprint, 2024

NeurIPS 2024
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Certified Robustness for Deep Equilibrium Models via Serialized Random Smoothing

Weizhi Gao, Zhichao Hou, Han Xu, Xiaorui Liu

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024

NeurIPS 2023
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Equivariant spatio-temporal attentive graph networks to simulate physical dynamics

Zhichao Hou*, Liming Wu*, Jirui Yuan, Yu Rong, Wenbing Huang

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023

IEEE BigData 2024
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Automated Polynomial Filter Learning for Graph Neural Networks

Wendi Yu, Zhichao Hou, Xiaorui Liu

IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE BigData), 2024

Preprint 2024
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HLogformer: A Hierarchical Transformer for Representing Log Data

Zhichao Hou, Mina Ghashami, Mikhail Kuznetsov, MohamadAli Torkamani

Preprint, 2024

BMC Bioinformatics 2023
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PathExpSurv: pathway expansion for explainable survival analysis and disease gene discovery

Zhichao Hou, Jiacheng Leng, Jiating Yu, Zheng Xia, Ling-Yun Wu.

BMC Bioinformatics, 2023

Briefings in Bioinformatics 2024
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Incorporating network diffusion and peak location information for better single-cell ATAC-seq data analysis

Jiating Yu, Jiacheng Leng, Zhichao Hou, Duanchen Sun, Ling-Yun Wu.

Briefings in Bioinformatics, 2024

Preprint 2023
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Can Directed Graph Neural Networks be Adversarially Robust?

Zhichao Hou, Xitong Zhang, Wei Wang, Charu C Aggarwal, Xiaorui Liu

Preprint, 2023

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • 2018.12 🏀 Champion of Mingyue Cup Basketball Match of BNU (FMVP)
  • 2017/2018/2019 🏆 First-class scholarship of Beijing Normal University

📖 Educations

  • 2023.06 - (now), PhD in Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh
  • 2020.09 - 2023.06, MS in Mathematics, Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Beijing
  • 2016.09 - 2020.06, BS in Mathematics, Beijing Normal University, Beijing

💬 Invited Talks and Tutorials

  • 2024.10, Tutorial: “Adversarial Robustness in Graph Neural Networks: Recent Advances and New Frontier”, DSAA 2024, San Diego
  • 2024.03, Robustify Transformers via Plug-and-Play Paradigm, MSU
  • 2024.01, Research Lightning Talk on Large Language Models and AI Security, NCSU

💻 Internships