Biography

I am currently a research assistant at Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Chaochao Lu. I received my master’s degree from Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU) advised by Prof. Feiping Nie, and my bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (NJUPT) under the supervision of Prof. Lei Chen.

My research interests include eXplainable AI (XAI), causal discovery, and foundation models. I am also interested in data mining and medical AI.

I am actively looking for a PhD position in Fall, 2025. I’m open to any meaningful research topics during my doctoral studies.

Email: solerxl1998@gmail.com

Interests
  • eXplainable AI (XAI)
  • LLMs
  • Causal Discovery
  • Feature Selection
  • Medical AI
Education

  • M.Eng. in Computer Technology, 2021 - 2024

    Northwestern Polytechnical University

  • B.Eng. in Information Security, 2017 - 2021

    Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications

Selected Publications

For full publications, please refer to my Google Scholar. ($^†$: equally contributed, $^*$: corresponding author.)
*
All Journal Conference Under Review
Joint Feature and Differentiable k-NN Graph Learning using Dirichlet Energy
Lei Xu, Lei Chen, Rong Wang, Feiping Nie$^*$, Xuelong Li.
in Proceedings of the 37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023
PDF
Joint Feature and Differentiable k-NN Graph Learning using Dirichlet Energy
Efficient Top-k Feature Selection Using Coordinate Descent Method
Lei Xu$^†$, Rong Wang$^†$, Feiping Nie$^*$, Xuelong Li.
in Proceedings of the 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023
PDF Code
Efficient Top-k Feature Selection Using Coordinate Descent Method
Semi-Supervised Top-k Feature Selection with a General Optimization Framework
Lei Xu, Rong Wang, Feiping Nie$^*$, Jun Wu, Xuelong Li.
in Proceedings of 2023 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), 2023
PDF
Semi-Supervised Top-k Feature Selection with a General Optimization Framework
Multi-modal sequence learning for Alzheimer’s disease progression prediction with incomplete variable-length longitudinal data
Lei Xu, Hui Wu, Chunming He, Jun Wang, Changqing Zhang, Feiping Nie, Lei Chen$^*$.
Medical Image Analysis (MedIA), 2022
PDF Code
Multi-modal sequence learning for Alzheimer’s disease progression prediction with incomplete variable-length longitudinal data
Modeling Disease Progression via Weakly Supervised Temporal Multitask Matrix Completion
Lingsheng Wang, Lei Xu, Ping Li, Siming Zha, Lei Chen$^*$.
in Proceedings of 2020 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), 2020
PDF
Modeling Disease Progression via Weakly Supervised Temporal Multitask Matrix Completion
Revisiting ℓ2,0-norm Constrained Least Square Regression Problem
Rong Wang, Lei Xu, Feiping Nie, Xuelong Li$^*$.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) (Under Review)

Awards

Xiaomi Special Scholarship (Only 10 awardees in NWPU)
Northwestern Polytechnical University Oct 2023
National Scholarship for Graduate Students (Rank 1/208)
Northwestern Polytechnical University Oct 2022
Outstanding Graduate
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications Jun 2021
National Scholarship for Undergraduate Students (Rank 2/159)
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications Oct 2018

Teaching

Teaching Assistant for Fundamentals of Machine Learning
Northwestern Polytechnical University Sep 2023 – Jan 2024
Teaching Assistant for Fundamentals of Machine Learning
Northwestern Polytechnical University Mar 2022 – Jan 2023
Tutor at the Students’ Association for Science and Technology
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications Jun 2018 – Jun 2019