Yiwei Lu

About Me

I will be joining the University of Ottawa as an Assistant Professor, starting September 2025. I obtained my Ph.D. in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, where I was fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yaoliang Yu and Dr. Sun Sun. I was also a student affiliate of the Vector Institute and a research affiliate of The Salon with Prof. Gautam Kamath.

Previously, I have completed my M.Sc. in Computer Science at the University of Manitoba, where I was advised by Prof. Yang Wang. I did my bachelors at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. I was also an exchange student at UC Santa Barbara.

I am looking for motivated students to join my group. Please see the Prospective Students page for more information.

Research Interests

My research focuses on trustworthy machine learning, specifically examining how external training data affects model performance and robustness. This includes studying data poisoning attacks, the impact of problematic training data (e.g., disguised copyrighted material), and developing machine unlearning techniques to mitigate their effects.

More generally, I am interested in building a trustworthy machine learning pipeline, spanning from data to training procedures and models. This includes topics in (but is not limited to) memorization, data attribution, neural network quantization, self-supervised learning, diffusion training, and tools in non-convex optimization.

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