About me

Hi! I’m Xueqi Cheng, a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Florida State University, advised by Dr. Yushun Dong in the Responsible AI (RAI) Lab. My research goal is to make AI trustworthy and efficient for real-world use. Earlier in my Ph.D., working with Dr. Tyler Derr at Vanderbilt University, I studied how to make AI reliable, fair, and private on real-world network data. I now carry this goal to large language models and AI agents, so that they are dependable and affordable to deploy. I have published first-author papers at top venues including NeurIPS, KDD (Oral), and WSDM, and co-authored papers at ICLR and in journals including ACM Computing Surveys, IEEE TKDE, and ACM TIST. I have conducted industrial research as a research intern at Nokia Applied Research and AT&T Labs. I have received awards including the Naaman Franklin Faile Jr. Graduate Fellowship (2025, 2026), the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute Scholarship, the IBM PhD Fellowship, the NeurIPS Travel Award, and the WSDM NSF Travel Award, and I serve as a reviewer for venues such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, KDD, WWW, etc. I was recognized as a Top Reviewer at NeurIPS 2026.

Feel free to drop me an Email if you are interested in collaboration!

Research Interests

• Agentic AI: agent distillation, which transfers the capabilities of large LLM-based agents into smaller and more efficient models, and model routing, which dispatches each query to the most suitable model.
• LLM Compression: making LLMs cheaper to deploy and serve through knowledge distillation, pruning, quantization, and related techniques.
• Multimodal Models: improving the capability, efficiency, and reliability of multimodal large language models (MLLMs).
• AI for Social Good and Real-World Applications: applying AI to societally important problems, including social network analysis and civil and infrastructure engineering.

Selected Publications

^* Equal contribution. See the full publication list.

News

• [10/2026] 🏆 Recognized as a Top Reviewer at NeurIPS’26!
• [10/2026] 🏅 Received the Travel Award for NeurIPS’26!
• [10/2026] 🏅 Received the Naaman Franklin Faile Jr. Graduate Fellowship from Florida State University for the second time!
• [10/2026] 📄 Our preprint HazardWeaver: Scientific Route Selection for Hazard Analysis Agents is now available online!
• [10/2026] 📄 Our preprint Capability Scaling-Down Laws for LLM Compression is now available online!
• [09/2026] 🎉 Our paper LatentRouter: Can We Choose the Right Multimodal Large Language Model Before Seeing Its Answer? has been accepted at NeurIPS’26!
• [09/2026] 🎉 Our survey Towards Trustworthy Retrieval Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey has been published in ACM Computing Surveys!
• [06/2026] 📄 Our preprint Adverse Online Social Interactions: A Multi-Level Evolutionary Analysis of Local Patterns, Diffusion, and Community Disruption is now available online!