Yaokun Liu

About Me

Hello, this is Yaokun Liu (刘尧锟 in Chinese)! I am a second-year Ph.D. studentadvised by Prof. Dong Wang at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Prior to that, I earned my M.Eng. in Computer Science from Tianjin University and my B.S. in Intelligence Science and Technology from University of Science and Technology Beijing .

Research Interests

My research interests include but not limited to:

• Trustworthy and Reliable LLMs: uncertainty quantification, model alignment, and activation steering for safe model behavior.
• LLM Personalization: user modeling, preference learning, and generative recommendation.

News

• [Jan. 2026] Two papers on uncertainty estimation and image generation red-teaming accepted to WWW 2026! 🎉
• [Jul. 2025] One paper is accepted to ICCV 2025!

Selected Publications

• Mind the Ambiguity: Aleatoric Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs for Safe Medical Question Answering
  Yaokun Liu, Yifan Liu, Phoebe Mbuvi, Zelin Li, Ruichen Yao, Gawon Lim, Dong Wang
  WWW 2026

• Attribute Simulation for Item Embedding Enhancement in Multi-Interest Recommendation
  Yaokun Liu, Xiaowang Zhang, Minghui Zou, Zhiyong Feng
  WSDM 2024 [Paper] [Code]

• Co-Occurrence Embedding Enhancement for Long-Tail Problem in Multi-Interest Recommendation
  Yaokun Liu, Xiaowang Zhang, Minghui Zou, Zhiyong Feng
  RecSys 2023 [Paper]

• Red-Teaming Privacy-Protective Perturbations: Blind Face Restoration as an Attack Strategy
  Zelin Li, Yifan Liu, Huimin Zeng, Yaokun Liu, Ruichen Yao, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
  WWW 2026

• Modality Interactive Mixture-of-Experts for Fake News Detection
  Yifan Liu, Yaokun Liu, Zelin Li, Ruichen Yao, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
  WWW 2025 [Paper]

• Component-Based Fairness in Face Attribute Classification with Bayesian Network-informed Meta Learning
  Yifan Liu, Ruichen Yao, Yaokun Liu, Ruohan Zong, Zelin Li, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
  FAccT 2025 [Paper]

• Anti-Tamper Protection for Unauthorized Individual Image Generation
  Zelin Li, Ruohan Zong, Yifan Liu, Ruichen Yao, Yaokun Liu, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
  ICCV 2025 [Paper]

Preprints

• Learning Decomposed Contextual Token Representations from Pretrained and Collaborative Signals for Generative Recommendation
  Yifan Liu, Yaokun Liu, Zelin Li, Zhenrui Yue, Gyuseok Lee, Ruichen Yao, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
  arXiv 2025 [Paper]

• Session-Based Recommendation with Validated and Enriched LLM Intents
  Gyuseok Lee, Yaokun Liu, Yifan Liu, Susik Yoon, Dong Wang, SeongKu Kang
  arXiv 2025 [Paper]

• MASH: A Multiplatform and Multimodal Annotated Dataset for Societal Impact of Hurricane
  Ruichen Yao, Aslanbek Murzakhmetov, Raaghav Pillai, Aliya Maussymbayeva, Zelin Li, Yifan Liu, Yaokun Liu, Lanyu Shang, Yang Zhang, Na Wei and others
  arXiv 2025 [Paper]

Services

Conference Reviewers

• The Web Conference (WWW)
• ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD)
• International Joint Conference on Knowledge Graphs (IJCKG)

Journal Reviewers

• IEEE Transactions on Big Data
• World Wide Web Journal
• Journal of Frontiers of Computer Science and Technology

Awards

• Illinois Distinguished Fellowship (3-year)

My Cats 🐾

Here are some photos of my lovely cats! They often keep me company during my research.

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