Quant Researcher @ JoinQuant · Research in Trustworthy AI 🤖
Explainability 🔍 · Robustness 🛡️ · Faithfulness ✅ · Safety 🔒
I am Songning Lai (you can call me Sony). I received my B.S. from the School of Information Science and Engineering, Chongxin College, Shandong University, supervised by Prof. Zhi Liu. I was a Research Assistant at HKUST(GZ) AI Thrust & INFO Hub, supervised by Prof. Yutao Yue. I also had an international research experience as a Visiting Student at KAUST. I am currently a Quant Researcher at JoinQuant.
My primary research interest lies in Trustworthy AI, encompassing explainability, robustness, faithfulness, and safety. I have focused extensively on Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) and their applications in vision-language interpretation, medical diagnosis, continual learning, and autonomous driving. I also work on faithful time series forecasting, LLM explainability & knowledge editing, and multimodal learning.
| Area | Topics |
|---|---|
| Concept Bottleneck Models | Faithful vision-language interpretation (ICLR 2024), medical multi-dimensional explanation (NeurIPS 2024), continual learning (ACM MM 2025 BNI), backdoor & security |
| Trustworthy ML | Robustness, faithfulness, interpretability, time series under uncertainty (ICML 2025, ICASSP 2026) |
| Applications | Medical imaging, autonomous driving (ICRA 2025), LLM knowledge editing (ICLR 2026) |
- 01.2026 — ACE: Attribution-Controlled Knowledge Editing for Multi-hop Factual Recall accepted at ICLR 2026.
- 01.2026 — Time series forecasting under uncertainty (ambiguity & novelty rejection) accepted at ICASSP 2026 (CCF B).
- 01.2026 — TPTD (privacy-preserving truth discovery) accepted at Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) (JCR Q1).
- 12.2025 — Da Yu (USV-based image captioning) accepted at IEEE TCSVT (IF 11.1, CCF B).
- 10.2025 — Mimicking the Physicist's Eye (VLM for physics formula discovery) accepted at NeurIPS 2025 Workshop (spotlight).
- 08.2025 — 3 papers at ACM MM 2025 BNI Track (CONCIL, Physics-Informed Radio-Map, Audio LM metaphorical reasoning).
- 07.2025 — 4 papers at ACM MM 2025 (FTS, ANT, Text2Weight, CFSSeg).
- 05.2025 — SVCT: Stable Vision Concept Transformers for Medical Diagnosis at ECML-PKDD 2025.
- 09.2024 — Med-MICN: Multi-dimensional Explanation for Medical Classification at NeurIPS 2024 (CCF A).
More news on my website.
| Year | Venue | Paper | Project / Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | ICLR | ACE: Attribution-Controlled Knowledge Editing for Multi-hop Factual Recall | Web · Code |
| 2026 | ICASSP | Towards Reliable Time Series Forecasting under Future Uncertainty | — |
| 2025 | ACM MM BNI | CONCIL: Continual Learning for Multimodal Concept Bottleneck Models | Web · Code |
| 2025 | ACM MM | FTS: Faithful TimeSieve for Multimedia Web Forecasting | Web · Code |
| 2025 | ICRA | DRIVE: Interpretable Ensemble Framework in Autonomous Driving | Web · Code |
| 2025 | ECML | SVCT: Stable Vision Concept Transformers for Medical Diagnosis | Web · Code |
| 2025 | ICASSP | PEPL: Precision-Enhanced Pseudo-Labeling for Fine-Grained Image Classification | — |
| 2024 | NeurIPS | Med-MICN: Multi-dimensional Explanation for Medical Classification | Web · Code |
| 2024 | ICLR | FVLC: Faithful Vision-Language Interpretation via Concept Bottleneck Models | Web · Code |
Full list: xll0328.github.io — Publications
| Type | Award |
|---|---|
| 🏆 | NeurIPS 2024 Travel Award |
| 🏆 | ICRA 2025 Travel Award |
| ⭐ | IEEE/EI CISP-BMEI 2022 Best Paper Award |
| 🥇 | First Prize, Contemporary Undergraduate Mathematical Contest in Modeling (National, top 0.6%) |
| 🥇 | First Prize, MathorCup University Mathematical Modeling Challenge (National, top 3%) |
| 🥈 | Second Prize, National Undergraduate Electronic Design Contest (Shandong Province) |
| 🥈 | Second Prize, National Crypto-math Challenge (East China) |
| 🎓 | Outstanding graduate of Shandong Province & Shandong University |
| 📊 | 40+ university-level awards (competitions, social practice, innovation, sports, volunteer, scholarship) |
| Period | Role | Place |
|---|---|---|
| Now | Quant Researcher | JoinQuant |
| Apr 2024 – Sep 2025 | Research Assistant | HKUST(GZ) AI Thrust & INFO Hub |
| Apr 2023 – Mar 2024 | Visiting Student | KAUST |
| Sep 2020 – Jun 2024 | B.S. (Information Science and Engineering) | Shandong University, Chongxin College |
Conference & Journal Reviewer: ECAI, ICML, KDD, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, NeurIPS, ACM MM, IJCAI, Expert Systems with Applications, etc.
Jiayu Yang · Wenshuo Chen · Jiemin Wu · Weilin Ruan · Jiakang Li · and more on my website
Interested in collaboration or chat? 📧 Email me · 🌐 Full site