Welcome to Defu Cao's Homepage
Defu Cao(曹德福) is a Ph.D. in Thomas Lord Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California ,
working with Prof. Yan Liu at the USC Melady Lab . He is also working with Prof. Angela Zhou from USC Marshall Data Sciences and Operations.
Prior, he earned his Master's Degree at school of EECS Peking University where he was co-advised by Prof. Xu Cheng and Prof. Xianhua Liu .
Cao is primarily interested in developing machine learning and data mining algorithms that demonstrate a deep understanding of the world with special structures, including time series, spatio-temporal data, and relational data.
To this end, his research aims to integrate causal inference, graph neural networks, spectral domain representation, interpretability, and robustness.
In addition, he is also interested in causal representation learning and pre-training large language models.
He has published his research in top conference proceedings including NeurIPS, CVPR, ICLR, ICRA, ICDM and NAACL, etc.
This summer, he joined MBZUAI as a research assistant, working with Prof. Kun Zhang and Prof. Biwei Huang on causality.
In summer 2022, he finished his research internship in Abobe research, mentored by Dr. Zhaowen Wang .
Previously, he worked as a Research Intern at Microsoft Research Lab Asia (MSRA) twice, where he worked closely with Dr. Yujing Wang
and Alibaba Damo Academy’s Data Analytics and Intelligence Lab advised by Dr. Jingren Zhou .
Besides, he finished his first internship with grateful in Baidu 5 years ago.
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News
04/2024: Defu Cao has been selected for the following 2024 Viterbi Graduate Student Award: Best Research Assistant Award! (1 per department)
03/2024: Defu Cao has been awarded an Graduate School Endowed Fellowship for the one academic year!
01/2024: One paper has been accepted by WWW and two papers have been accepted by ICLR !
12/2023: One paper from the mentioned undergraduate has been accepted by AAAI Mentored Undergraduate Research Program !
10/2023: One paper on Financial Time-Series Forecasting has been accepted by ICAIF as Oral paper!
06/2023: He joined MBZUAI as a visiting scholar, with the pleasure of working with Prof. Kun Zhang !
06/2023: Invited talk at Google Sustainable Urban Mobility: Simulation and Optimization Workshop ! [slides] .
02/2023: One paper on Representation Learning has been accepted by CVPR !
01/2023: One paper on Neural Operator has been accepted by ICLR !
12/2022: One paper on Time-Series Forecasting has been accepted by SDM !
11/2022: One paper on Causal Inference has been accepted by AAAI !
10/2022: One paper on Out-of-distribution benchmark has been accepted by NeurIPS DistShift !
09/2022: One paper on Causal Inference has been accepted by NeurIPS !
07/2022: One paper on Causal Inference has been accepted by ICML Continuous time workshop !
05/2022: One paper has been accepted by IEEE ICCCAS !
04/2022: One paper has been accepted by NAACL main conference!
03/2022: Published the pre-print survey paper of 'Physics-Informed Machine Learning'!
02/2022: Accepted the Research Scientist Intern offer of Adobe Research !
01/2022: One paper has been accepted by PAKDD !
11/2021: Organized ICAIF 2021 workshop - Time Series in Finance !
Research
Survey Papers:
When Physics Meets Machine Learning: A Survey of Physics-Informed Machine Learning
Chuizheng Meng, Sungyong Seo, Defu Cao , Sam Griesemer, Yan Liu
Arxiv 2022 | paper
Conference Papers:
SVGformer: Representation Learning for Continuous Vector Graphics using Transformers
Defu Cao , Zhaowen Wang, Jose Echevarria, Yan Liu
CVPR 2023 | paper
Coupled Multiwavelet Neural Operator Learning for Coupled Partial Differential Equations
Xiongye Xiao, Defu Cao , Ruochen Yang, Gaurav Gupta, Gengshuo Liu, Chenzhong Yin, Radu Balan, Paul Bogdan
ICLR 2023 | paper
Time-delayed Multivariate Time Series Predictions
Hao Niu, Guillaume Habault, Roberto Legaspi, Chuizheng Meng, Defu Cao , Shinya Wada, Chihiro Ono, Yan Liu
SDM 2023 |
Estimating Treatment Effects from Irregular Time Series Observations with Hidden Confounders
Defu Cao , James Enouen, Yujing Wang, Xiangchen Song, Chuizheng Meng, Hao Niu, Yan Liu
AAAI 2023 | paper
Counterfactual Neural Temporal Point Process for Estimating Causal Influence of Misinformation on Social Media
Yizhou Zhang, Defu Cao , Yan Liu
NeurIPS 2022 | paper | code
Hardware Reusability Optimization for High-Level Synthesis of Component-Based Processors
Xianhua Liu, Defu Cao , Qinshu Chen
IEEE ICCCAS 2022 | paper
Enhancing Self-Attention with Knowledge-Assisted Attention Maps
Jiangang Bai, Yujing Wang, Hong Sun, Ruonan Wu, Tianmeng Yang, Pengfei Tang, Wei Shen, Defu Cao , Mingliang Zhang, Yaming Yang, Jing Bai, Yunhai Tong, Hao Sun, Ruofei Zhang
NAACL 2022 main conference | paper
Mu2ReST: Multi-Resolution Recursive Spatio-Temporal Transformer for Long-Term Prediction
Hao Niu, Chuizheng Meng, Defu Cao , Guillaume Habault, Roberto Legaspi, Shinya Wada, Chihiro Ono, Yan Liu
PAKDD 2022 | paper
Spectral Temporal Graph Neural Network for Trajectory Prediction
Defu Cao , Jiachen Li, Hengbo Ma, Masayoshi Tomizuka
ICRA 2021 | paper
Spectral temporal graph neural network for multivariate time-series forecasting
Defu Cao , Yujing Wang, Juanyong Duan, Ce Zhang, Xia Zhu, Conguri Huang, Yunhai Tong, Bixiong Xu, Jing Bai, Jie Tong, Qi Zhang
NeurIPS 2020 | paper | code | video | Spotlight (2%)
Multivariate time-series anomaly detection via graph attention network
Hang Zhao, Yujing Wang, Juanyong Duan, Congrui Huang, Defu Cao , Yunhai Tong, Bixiong Xu, Jing Bai, Jie Tong, Qi Zhang
ICDM 2020 | paper | code
FTCLNet: Convolutional LSTM with Fourier Transform for Vulnerability Detection
Defu Cao , Jing Huang, Xuanyu Zhang, Xianhua Liu
TrustCom 2020 | paper
Workshop Papers:
DSLOB: A Synthetic Limit Order Book Dataset for Benchmarking Forecasting Algorithms under Distributional Shift
Defu Cao , Yousef El-Laham, Loc Trinh, Svitlana Vyetrenko, Yan Liu
NeurIPS 2022 | paper | Proposed Dataset
Estimating Treatment Effects in Continuous Time with Hidden Confounders
Defu Cao , James Enouen, Yan Liu
ICML 2022 | video | paper
Awards
2021, Annenberg Fellowship
2021, MSRA Stars of Tomorrow Internship Program Award
2020, National Scholarship for Graduate Students
2020, Huawei Scholarship
2019, Intel Scholarship
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