Wei Qian

Wei Qian

PhD Student in Computer Science · Iowa State University

I work on trustworthy machine learning and large language models, with a focus on unlearning, privacy, security, robustness, and uncertainty.

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Wei Qian

About

I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Iowa State University, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Mengdi Huai. My research focuses on data mining, trustworthy machine learning, and large language models, with particular interests in privacy, security, robustness, and uncertainty.

Before joining Iowa State, I earned an MS in Computer Science from Michigan Technological University and a BS in Computer Science from Lake Superior State University.

Research interests: large language models, machine unlearning, privacy and security, robust machine learning, conformal prediction, fairness, and explainability.

Selected Publications

  1. Towards Benchmarking Privacy Vulnerabilities in Selective Forgetting with Large Language Models

    Wei Qian*, Chenxu Zhao*, Yangyi Li, Mengdi Huai

    AAAI 2026

  2. Towards Unveiling Predictive Uncertainty Vulnerabilities in the Context of the Right to Be Forgotten

    Wei Qian*, Chenxu Zhao*, Yangyi Li, Wenqian Ye, Mengdi Huai

    CIKM 2025

  3. Rethinking Adversarial Robustness in the Context of the Right to be Forgotten

    Chenxu Zhao*, Wei Qian*, Yangyi Li, Aobo Chen, Mengdi Huai

    ICML 2024

  4. Towards Modeling Uncertainties of Self-explaining Neural Networks via Conformal Prediction

    Wei Qian*, Chenxu Zhao*, Yangyi Li*, Fenglong Ma, Chao Zhang, Mengdi Huai

    AAAI 2024

  5. Static and Sequential Malicious Attacks in the Context of Selective Forgetting

    Chenxu Zhao*, Wei Qian*, Zhitao Ying, Mengdi Huai

    NeurIPS 2023

  6. Towards Understanding and Enhancing Robustness of Deep Learning Models against Malicious Unlearning Attacks

    Wei Qian*, Chenxu Zhao*, Wei Le, Meiyi Ma, Mengdi Huai

    KDD 2023

View all publications →

* Equal contribution.

Education

  • PhD in Computer Science
    Iowa State University
    Advisor: Prof. Mengdi Huai
  • MS in Computer Science
    Michigan Technological University
    Advisor: Prof. Nilufer Onder
  • BS in Computer Science
    Lake Superior State University
    Advisor: Prof. Christopher Smith · Magna Cum Laude

Honors & Awards

  • John Vincent Atanasoff Award, Iowa State University, 2026
  • NSF Dependable Data Driven Discovery (D4) Scholar Award, Iowa State University, 2026
  • Publication Award, Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University, 2022–2026
  • Research Excellence Award, Iowa State University, 2024
  • ACM SIGKDD Student Travel Award, 2023
  • Magna Cum Laude honor award, Lake Superior State University, 2018
  • Outstanding Computer Science Graduate and Outstanding Mathematics and Computer Science Senior, Lake Superior State University, 2018
  • Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) member, 2014–2018

Professional Service

Reviewer and External Reviewer

  • Reviewer for ICLR 2026, AAAI 2026, NeurIPS 2025, CVPR 2025, and TNNLS 2024
  • External reviewer for ACL 2026, CVPR 2026, AAAI 2025, ICLR 2025, ECCV 2024, and BigData 2023

Other Service

  • Teaching assistant, NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU), 2025
  • Teaching assistant, Summer Bootcamp on Deep Learning and Applications, 2024
  • Student volunteer, ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2023

Contact

Email: wqi AT iastate DOT edu

Location: Ames, Iowa, USA