Xiwei Xuan
/SEE-way SHWAN/
(宣茜瑋, 宣茜玮)
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Virginia Commonwealth University
- Google Scholar
- ResearchGate
- ORCID
- CV
- xuanx[at]vcu[dot]edu
- Richmond, VA
I am a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Commonwealth University, where I direct the WAVE (World-Aware Vision & Learning) Laboratory.
My research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer vision, and data analytics, aiming at advancing responsible and efficient AI scaling across heterogeneous modalities and diverse applications.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis, in June 2026, where I was advised by Distinguished Professor Kwan-Liu Ma. Before that, I received my M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2020. In the summers of 2022 and 2023, I was a Research Intern at the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, Bosch Research North America.
RESEARCH INTEREST
Data-Centric AI
- Data Validation and Curation
- Adaptive Benchmarking
Applied AI
- Model Validation and Enhancement
- Domain Adaptation
Efficient and Reliable Learning
- Generative and Agentic AI
- Multimodal Learning
Ph.D. Students Position OpeningI am looking for Ph.D. students starting in Fall 2027. Please contact me at xwxuan.vcu[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject format PhD Application-[your_name]-[your_school]-[your_major]. Please include your CV, transcripts, English proficiency score, and other relevant materials/information.
NEWS
[2026.08] I’ve started as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Commonwealth University. (News)
[2026.03] I will serve as an Agentic AI4SE co-Chair at SANER 2027, the 34th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering.
[2025.09] I’ve started co-teaching ECS 289H, Explainable AI, a graduate-level course at UC Davis!
[2025.06] Our paper "ReME: A Data-Centric Framework for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation" has been accepted by ICCV 2025 (🏆 Highlight Paper).
[2025.05] Gave a talk at Women in Tech Global Conference 2025.
[2025.04] Honored to receive the 🏆 2025 Excellence in Graduate Student Research Award from the UC Davis College of Engineering. (News: COE | CS)
[2025.03] Our paper "VISLIX: An XAI Framework for Validating Vision Models with Slice Discovery and Analysis" has been accepted by EuroVis 2025.
[2025.02] Our paper "AttributionScanner: A Visual Analytics System for Model Validation with Metadata-Free Slice Finding" has been accepted by IEEE TVCG.
[2025.01] Our paper "VISTA: A Visual Analytics Framework to Enhance Foundation Model-Generated Data Labels" has been accepted by IEEE TVCG.
[2024.08] I’ve started teaching ECS 171, Machine Learning, an upper-division undergraduate course at UC Davis. Looking forward to an engaging quarter with the students!
[2024.07] Our paper "SLIM: Spuriousness Mitigation with Minimal Human Annotations" has been accepted by ECCV 2024.
[2024.04] Our paper "SUNY: A Visual Interpretation Framework for CNNs from a Necessary and Sufficient Perspective" has been accepted by the XAI4CV Workshop at CVPR 2024.
[2024.02] Our paper "USE: Universal Segment Embeddings for Open-Vocabulary Image Segmentation" has been accepted by CVPR 2024.
[2023.06] Started my research internship at Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI), USA.
[2023.02] Our paper "LabelVizier: Interactive Validation and Relabeling for Technical Text Annotations" has been accepted by IEEE PacificVis 2023.
[2022.06] Started my research internship at Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI), USA.
[2021.12] Our paper "VAC-CNN: A Visual Analytics System for Comparative Studies of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks" has been accepted by IEEE PacificVis 2022 and selected as one of the 🏆 highest-quality papers for publication in IEEE TVCG.
SELECTED AWARDS
Highlight Paper, ICCV 2025
Highlight Paper Award for 'ReME: A Data-Centric Framework for Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Segmentation'.
Excellence in Graduate Student Research Award, UC Davis College of Engineering, 2025
Awarded the 2025 Excellence in Graduate Student Research Award, which is given annually to one graduate student in the UC Davis College of Engineering. (News: COE | CS)
Highly Helpful Reviewer, ACM UIST, 2024
Selected as a highly helpful reviewer for the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in 2024.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Full list on my Google Scholar page.
LabelVizier: Interactive Validation and Relabeling for Technical Text Annotations
Xiaoyu Zhang*, Xiwei Xuan*, Alden Dima, Thurston Sexton, Kwan-Liu Ma (* equal contribution)
PacificVis, 2023
TEACHING
Virginia Commonwealth University
Instructor: CMSC 691 Human-AI Interaction
Graduate, Fall 2026
University of California, Davis
Instructor: ECS 171 Machine Learning (eval. score: 9.40/10.00)
Undergraduate, Summer 2024
Co-Instructor: ECS 289H Explainable and Responsible AI
Graduate, Fall 2025
Guest Instructor: ECS 273 Visual Analytics
Graduate, Winter 2023
Teaching Assistant: ECS 140A Programming Languages (eval. score: 4.36/5.00)
Undergraduate, Spring 2022
Teaching Assistant: ECS 32C Implementation of Data Structure in C (eval. score: 4.25/5.00)
Undergraduate, Winter 2021
SERVICE
Co-Chair
Agentic AI4SE at SANER 2027
Co-Organizer
1st Workshop on Embodied Spatial Reasoning at ICCV 2025
Reviewer
Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI)
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
IEEE VIS
ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)🏆 Highly Helpful Reviewer, 2024
British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC)
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (TIP)
ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)
IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis)
IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI)
Visual Informatics
Computational Visual Media Journal (CVMJ)
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
ACM Automotive User Interfaces (AutomotiveUI)
ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS)
JOIN US
Prospective PhD Students
Our team is continuously looking for excellent Ph.D. students in multimodal learning, generative AI, AI agents, and learning efficiency. Please contact me at xwxuan.vcu[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject format PhD Application-[your_name]-[your_school]-[your_major]. Please include your CV, transcripts, English proficiency score, and other relevant materials/information.
Prospective Research Interns
I am always excited to collaborate with highly motivated students on dedicated research projects. If you are interested in research internships or visiting positions, please get in touch via this form.