Dr. Kunpeng Liu is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at Clemson University. Before that, he was an Assistant Professor at Portland State University. He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL. He received both an M.E. degree and a B.E. degree from the Department of Automation, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), Hefei.

He has broad interests in Reinforcement Learning (RL), Large Language Models (LLMs), Data-centric AI (DCAI), and AI for Science. His recent research focuses on: (1) how RL can enable reliable decision-making in dynamic and uncertain environments, including uncertainty-aware offline RL, multi-agent decision-making, and sim-to-real transfer, with applications to energy systems and emergency medical services; (2) how RL can improve LLMs, including RL from human feedback (RLHF) for alignment and incentivizing reasoning capabilities; (3) how data science can improve LLMs, including efficient LLM fine-tuning (with limited human-labeled data) and effective LLM reasoning (with external data); (4) how RL can improve feature spaces, including automated feature selection and generation. A unifying thread across these directions is how learning agents can make trustworthy sequential decisions when feedback is noisy, comes from multiple sources, and evolves over time, a question that grows increasingly important as AI systems begin to work alongside humans in complex, high-stakes settings.

His research has been recognized with Best Paper Award nominations at IEEE ICDM 2021, ACM CIKM 2025, and IEEE ICDM 2025. He serves as Area Chair or (Senior) Program Committee member for premier AI and machine learning conferences, including NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, ACL, KDD, WWW, and ICDM. He has co-organized one tutorial and five workshops on Data-centric AI, and has held organizing roles at several IEEE conferences, including as High School Symposium Co-Chair of IEEE BigData 2026. He is a recipient of the NSF CRII and NSF CAREER Awards.

News

• 08/2026 Yutong Chen, Hongyu Cao, Rui Liu joined our group. Welcome!

• 08/2026 One paper was accepted by the ACM AI Leadership Summit 2026.

• 08/2026 Invited as an Area Chair for ICML 2027.

• 07/2026 Our NSF proposal "Collaborative Research: CSR: VERITAS: Secure Vehicular Systems through Intelligent Information Flow Verification" (my role: Site PI) was awarded. Thank you, collaborators! Thank you, NSF!

• 07/2026 Served on an NSF panel.

• 07/2026 Guangfu Guo and Yutong Chen received the Robert M. Geist Endowed Fellowship Award. Congratulations to Guangfu and Yutong!

• 07/2026 Honored to receive the NSF CAREER Award!

• 05/2026 Served on an NSF panel.

• 05/2026 One paper was accepted by SIGKDD Explorations.

• 05/2026 One paper was accepted by Knowledge and Information Systems (KAIS).

• 05/2026 Invited as a Social Media Co-Chair of IEEE BIBM 2026.

• 03/2026 Invited as an Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026.

• 02/2026 Served on an NSF panel.

• 02/2026 One paper was accepted by ACM TKDD.

• 02/2026 Invited as a High School Symposium Co-Chair of IEEE BigData 2026.

• 01/2026 Guangfu Guo and Linjian Yang joined our group. Welcome!

• 01/2026 Henry has been named a Top 300 Scholar, and further named a top 40 finalist in the 85th Regeneron Science Talent Search—the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and mathematics competition for high school seniors. This honor comes with a $25,000 award. Congratulations to Henry! 

• 01/2026 Two papers were accepted by EACL 2026.

• 11/2025 Invited as an Area Chair for ICML 2026.

• 11/2025 One paper was accepted by KDD 2026.

• 11/2025 Jinghan Zhang won the Female Student Award in Data Science at ICDM 2025. Only two female students have received the honor this year. Congratulations to Jinghan!

• 11/2025 Our paper "Retrieval-Augmented Feature Generation for Domain-Specific Classification" won the Best Paper Award Candidate at ICDM 2025. Congratulations to collaborators!

• 11/2025 Our paper "Adaptive Context-Infused Performance Evaluator for Iterative Feature Space Optimization" won the Best Paper Award Candidate at CIKM 2025. Congratulations to collaborators!

• 11/2025 One paper was accepted by AAAI 2026.

• 10/2025 One paper was accepted by ACM TKDD.

• 10/2025 One paper was accepted by IEEE TKDE.

• 10/2025 Invited as an Area Chair for ACL Rolling Review (ARR), October 2025.

• 08/2025 One paper was accepted by ICDM 2025.

• 08/2025 Ruimin Dai joined our group. Welcome Ruimin!

• 08/2025 Joined the School of Computing, Clemson University as an Assistant Professor.

• 08/2025 Xinhao Zhang will intern at Hertz.

• 07/2025 Served on an NSF panel.

• 07/2025 Jinghan Zhang received the Robert M. Geist Endowed Fellowship Award. Congratulations to Jinghan!

• 07/2025 One paper was accepted by CIKM 2025.

• 07/2025 One paper was accepted by ACM TKDD.

• 06/2025 One paper was accepted by SIGdial 2025 with Henry Xie (Senior at Westview High School) as the first author. Well done, Henry!

• 06/2025 Jinghan Zhang will intern at Accenture.

• 05/2025 Two papers were accepted by ACL 2025.

• 05/2025 One paper was accepted by KDD 2025.

• 05/2025 Invited as a Social Media Co-Chair of IEEE ICDM 2025.

• 05/2025 Our workshop proposal "GeoGenAgent: The 1st International Workshop on Generative and Agentic AI for Multi-Modality Space-Time Intelligence" was accepted by ACM SIGSPATIAL 2025.

• 04/2025 Six papers were accepted by IJCAI 2025.

• 03/2025 Our workshop proposal "AI4DE: The 1st International Workshop on AI for Data Editing" has been accepted by KDD 2025.

• 03/2025 Our workshop proposal "ADSD: The 1st Workshop on AI-Ready Data for Science Discovery" has been accepted by ICDM 2025.

• 01/2025 Served on an NSF panel.

• 12/2024 Jinghan Zhang won the Best Poster Presentation Award at the IEEE BigData 2024 PhD Forum. Congratulations to Jinghan!

• 12/2024 Three papers were accepted by AAAI 2025.

• 12/2024 Invited as an Area Chair for ICML 2025.

• 11/2024 Our paper "Scoring with Large Language Models: A Study on Measuring Empathy of Responses in Dialogues" was accepted by the IEEE BigData 2024 Undergraduate and High School Symposium. Henry Xie is the first author and he is a junior student at Westview High School, Portland. This paper has been selected as the Best Paper and won Henry the AI Youth Star Award. Well done, Henry!

• 10/2024 Two papers were accepted by IEEE ICKG 2024.

• 08/2024 Our NSF proposal "Collaborative Research: III: Small: Closing Sim-to-Real Gap in Reinforcement Learning via Randomization, Alignment, and Derivation" (my role: Lead PI) was awarded. Thank you, collaborators! Thank you, NSF!

• 07/2024 Our tutorial "Tabular Data-centric AI: Challenges, Techniques and Future Perspectives" was accepted by CIKM 2024.

• 07/2024 One paper was accepted by CIKM 2024.

• 06/2024 Honored to receive the NSF CRII Award!

• 05/2024 Honored to receive the Wedge Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising and Mentoring!

• 05/2024 One paper was accepted by ACL 2024.

• 04/2024 Two papers were accepted by IJCAI 2024.

• 04/2024 New homepage released.