Pingbang Hu

胡平邦

I speak TeX
Illinois, United States
pbb@illinois.edu

About Me

I'm a second-year Ph.D. candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) 🌽 advised by Jiaqi Ma. During my PhD, I've had the immense delight of interning at Amazon AWS AI Lab 🗽 and National Institute of Informatics 🇯🇵. Previously, I obtained my Master degree from UIUC 🌽 and dual Bachelor degree from University of Michigan 〽️ and Shanghai Jiao Tong University 🇨🇳.

My current research focus is on trustworthy ML and data-centric AI, with the goal being to draw theoretical insights from practical problems and develop algorithms with provable guarantees and desirable properties such as efficiency, robustness, and fairness. Previously I have worked on graph neural networks and fast graph algorithms. Generally speaking, I hold a strong interest in theoretical stuffs that involves geometry.

My (crappy) research statement can be found here.

🗞️ News

  • 🚀 Interning @Amazon AWS AI Lab, come hanging out in New York 🗽 (Mar. 19, 2025)!

  • 🍻 One paper 📝 accepted by ICLR 2025 (Jan. 22, 2025).

  • 🏆 Received the Graduate Conference Travel Award from UIUC (Nov. 13, 2024)!

  • 🏆 Received the NeurIPS 2024 Scholar Award, see you in Vancouver (Oct. 11, 2024)!

  • 🍻 Two papers 📝 accepted by NeurIPS 2024 with one Spotlight (Sep. 26, 2024).

  • 📚 We launched the ongoing Data Attribution Reading Group (June 23, 2024).

Only the latest news from the past year is listed. For more, please visit the Experience and Research.

🔖 Misc

I'm from Taiwan 🇹🇼! In my spare time, I enjoy street photography 📷 and playing drums 🥁.

Education

Aug. 2023 - Present
Ph.D. in Information Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Aug. 2023 - May 2025
M.S. in Mathematics
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Sep. 2021 - Apr. 2023
B.S. in Computer Science | minor in Mathematics
University of Michigan
Sep. 2019 - Aug. 2023
B.E. in Electrical and Computer Engineering | minor in Computer Science
Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Interests

Mathematical Statistics
Learning Theory
Graph Theory
Algorithmic Design
Game Theory
Geometry & Topology
Mathematical Analysis

Awards & Scholarships

Graduate Conference Travel Award
Nov. 2024
NeurIPS 2024 Scholar Award
Oct. 2024
Excellent Internship Award at National Institute of Informatics
Aug. 2024
Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Overseas Chinese Student Scholarship
Oct. 2021
Undergraduate Excellent Scholarship
Nov. 2020
Bao Gang Excellent Scholarship
June 2020
Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan Overseas Chinese Student Scholarship
Dec. 2019

Selected Research

GraSS: Scalable Influence Function with Sparse Gradient Compression
Pingbang Hu, 
Joseph Melkonian, 
Weijing Tang, 
Han Zhao, 
Jiaqi Ma
May 25th 2025
In Submission
#Data Attribution
#Optimization

We propose an efficient gradient compression algorithm to accelerate and scale influence function to billion-scale models.

arXiv
GitHub
Adversarial Attack on Data Attribution
Xinhe Wang, 
Pingbang Hu, 
Junwei Deng, 
Jiaqi Ma
Jan 22nd 2025
ICLR 2025
#Trustworthy
#Data Attribution

We consider the adversarial attack on training data attribution methods.

arXiv
Poster
Most Influential Subset Selection: Challenges, Promises, and Beyond
Yuzheng Hu, 
Pingbang Hu, 
Han Zhao, 
Jiaqi Ma
Sep 25th 2024
NeurIPS 2024
#Data Attribution
#Learning Theory

We provide a comprehensive study of the common practices in the Most Influential Subset Selection (MISS) problem.

arXiv
Poster
GitHub
Last Updated on Jun 5th 2025