• [10/2026] I am honored to serve as a senior area chair for ACL 2027.

• [10/2026] I am honored to serve as a panelist for both the Foundations of AI and AI Security sessions at the UC Riverside AI Summit.

• [10/2026] Our paper on Transformer-guided Relational Reasoning for Update Prioritization in Federated Learning has been accepted at WACV 2027.

• [10/2026] I am honored to give an invited talk at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley for the workshop on Trustworthy AI: From Hallucinations to Reliable Autonomy.

• [09/2026] Excited to share that three of our papers have been accepted at NeurIPS 2026: MT-JailBench: A Modular Benchmark for Understanding Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks, Do Reasoning LLMs Refuse What They Infer in Long Contexts?, and AbFlowNet: Optimizing Antibody-Antigen Binding Energy via Diffusion-GFlowNet Fusion.

• [08/2026] I am honored to serve as a senior area chair for NAACL 2027.

• [07/2026] Our paper on Enhancing Adversarial Robustness of Mobility-Scooter Riding Stability Analysis Model through Body-Informed Design is accepted at IEEE BSN 2026.

• [07/2026] Our paper on DSL-LLaDA: Scaling Continuous Denoising to 8B Masked Diffusion LMs is accepted at EMNLP 2026 Findings.

• [06/2026] I am honored to serve as a senior area chair for EMNLP 2026.

• [05/2026] Excited to share that the poster on EV classification for cancer detection that I worked on with Tijana Jovanovic-Talisman won the Best Poster Award at the U54 Symposium!

Welcome to UCR NLP Lab!

Lab Members

Director

Yue Dong, assistant professor of computer science and engineering

PhD Students

• Yu Fu, since Fall 2023

  • 2023:EMNLP 2023 Findings

  • 2024: AAAI 2024, NNACL 2024 TrustNLP workshop, ACL 2024, Microsoft 24 Summer Intern

  • 2025: PAKDD 2025, ICLR 2025, AAAI 2025, Amazon 25 Summer Intern

• Erfan Shayegani (co-advise with Prof. Nael B. Abu-Ghazaleh), since Summer 2023

Publications

2026

[55] Do Reasoning LLMs Refuse What They Infer in Long Contexts?

Yu Fu, Haz Sameen Shahgir, Zhipeng Wei, Huanli Gong, N. Benjamin Erichson, Yue Dong

NeurIPS 2026

[54] AbFlowNet: Optimizing Antibody-Antigen Binding Energy via Diffusion-GFlowNet Fusion

Abrar Rahman Abir, Haz Sameen Shahgir, Md. Rownok Zahan Ratul, Md Toki Tahmid, Greg Ver Steeg, Yue Dong

NeurIPS 2026

[53] MT-JailBench: A Modular Benchmark for Understanding Multi-Turn Jailbreak Attacks

Xinkai Zhang, Zhipeng Wei, Huanli Gong, Jing Ting Zheng, Yuchen Zhang, Yue Dong, N. Benjamin Erichson

NeurIPS 2026

[52] D-Judge: Disrupting Multi-Turn Jailbreaks using Semantics-Preserving Output Rewriting

Huanli Gong, Zhipeng Wei, Yu Fu, Haz Sameen Shahgir, Ananya Gupta, Yue Dong, N. Benjamin Erichson

ICML 2026

[51] VLMs Need Words: Vision Language Models Ignore Visual Detail In Favor of Semantic Anchors

Haz Sameen Shahgir, Xiaofu Chen, Yu Fu, Erfan Shayegani, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Yue Dong

COLM 2026

[50] Anchoring the Cache: Mitigating Contextual Hallucination in KV-Compressed Long-Context Summarization

Yu Fu, Chen Luo, Josef Valvoda, Xin Zhang, Xuejing Lei, Xiao Pan, Hui Liu, Yue Dong

ACL 2026

[49] Enhancing Adversarial Robustness of Mobility-Scooter Riding Stability Analysis Model through Body-Informed Design

Jasper Liu, M. Patel, C. Zhao, Haz Sameen Shahgir, Yue Dong, Tingting Chen

IEEE BSN 2026

[48] DSL-LLaDA: Scaling Continuous Denoising to 8B Masked Diffusion LMs

Longxuan Yu, Yunshu Wu, Yu Fu, Siheng Xiong, Rob Brekelmans, Hui Liu, Yue Dong, Greg Ver Steeg

EMNLP 2026

[47] A Real-Time System to Populate FRA Form 57 from News

Chansong Lim, Haz Sameen Shahgir, Yue Dong, Jia Chen, Evangelos E. Papalexakis

WSDM 2026

• [Spring 2024] CS 173 - Introduction to Natural Language Processing

• [Winter 2024] CS 222 - Natural Language Processing

• [Spring 2023] CS 173 - Introduction to Natural Language Processing

• [Winter 2023] CS 260 - Seminar in Natural Language Processing

Lead-organizer

• EMNLP 2025 workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization

• ACL 2024 Tutorial on Vulnerabilities of Large Language Models to Adversarial Attacks

• EMNLP 2023 workshop on New Frontiers in Summarization

Co-organizer

• NeurIPS 2024 workshop on [Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP-IV)]

• NeurIPS 2023 workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP-III)

• KDD 2023 tutorial on Fast Text Generation with Text-Editing Models

• NeurIPS 2022 workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP-II)

Invited talks

• [Winter/2026] Guest speaker , UGRD R’Excellence: How Bold Hearts and Brilliant Minds Are Made.

• [08/2025] Invited speaker , Monterey Data Conference.

• [06/2025] UC Tech 2025: Closing Keynote Speaker.

• [11/2023] Exploring Safety in Large Language Models YouTube 40:30 mins | News

  • 80th Annual Convention of Jiaotong University Alumni Association in SoCal (交通大学南加州校友会80周年庆), Los Angeles, CA, US

Fundings & Awards:

• UCR RAISE Seed Grant, Co-PI, Jan. 2026 - Dec. 2026

• NSF DUE (HSI), Co-PI, Sep. 2025 - Sep. 2030

• CAHSI-Google IRP Funding, PI, Sep. 2025 - Aug. 2026

• NSF CISE MSI, Co-PI, Jan. 2025 - Dec. 2027

• UCR Hellman Fellowship Award, July 2025 - June 2026

• UCR WCGEC Energy Research Seed Grants, June 2025 - June 2026

• Regents Faculty Fellowship grant, PI, July 2023 - June 2025

• UTCRS, Co-PI, June 2024 - June 2025

• UCR OASIS Internal Funding Awards, PI, June 2023 - June 2024

• Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need (GAANN) Program, U.S. Department of Education, Co-PI, Sep. 2024

• 2024-25 AiC Affiliate Assistance Fund (Outreach)

Academic Awards:

• Best Paper Award, Southern California NLP Symposium, 2023

• [ Best Paper Award ] at Canadian conference on artificial intelligence

• Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral (CGS D) - Accepted, 2018-2019

• NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship - Doctoral (PGS D) - Accepted, 2017-2018

• FRQNT Doctoral Scholarship - Declined (rank first in all 2016 applicants in mathematics), 2016