Boxuan Zhang

Boxuan Zhang

Incoming PhD student @Rutgers CS

🧐 About Me

I am an incoming CS PhD student (25 Fall) at Rutgers University, supervised by Prof. Ryan Tang. I have completed my master’s degree at Sensing IntelliGence and MAchine learning(SIGMA) Lab in Wuhan University, under the supervision of Prof. Zengmao Wang and Prof. Bo Du.

Previously, I was a research intern at RZ-Lab in Purdue University, advised by Prof. Ruqi Zhang. I was also fortunate to work with Prof. Lu Cheng, Prof. Bo Han and Jianing Zhu.

🤔Research Interests:
My current research focus is to develop methodologies for trustworthy machine learning, particularly in reliability and its applications to boost the safety of large language models and address critical challenges in healthcare. Besides, I am also experienced in other fields of machine learning like active learning, and its applications to object detection and remote sensing.

If you share the same research interests with me and are intereted in these areas or my previous works, feel free to drop me an email or add my Wechat . I am always delighted for potential collaborations!

🔥 News

💻 Recent Projects

(For more details can click the images)

    CoT-UQ    HCL-Spark    CoVer

📝 Publications

(* indicates equal contribution)

Preprint
sym

CoT-UQ: Improving Response-wise Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs with Chain-of-Thought

[Preprint, arXiv 2025]

Boxuan Zhang and Ruqi Zhang

TL;DR: Propose to quantify response-wise uncertainty by integrating LLMs’ inherent reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) into the UQ process.

[PDF]   [Code]   [BibTeX]

@article{zhang2025cot,
    title={CoT-UQ: Improving Response-wise Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs with Chain-of-Thought},
    author={Zhang, Boxuan and Zhang, Ruqi},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.17214},
    year={2025}
}
Preprint
sym

Shakespearean Sparks: The Dance of Hallucination and Creativity in LLMs’ Decoding Layers

[Preprint, arXiv 2025]

Zicong He*, Boxuan Zhang*, and Lu Cheng

TL;DR: Given the philosophical nature of creativity, we propose a narrow definition tailored to LLMs and introduce an evaluation framework, HCL, which quantifies Hallucination and Creativity across different Layers of LLMs during decoding.

[PDF]   [Code]   [BibTeX]

@article{he2025shakespearean,
  title={Shakespearean Sparks: The Dance of Hallucination and Creativity in LLMs' Decoding Layers},
  author={He, Zicong and Zhang, Boxuan and Cheng, Lu},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.02851},
  year={2025}
}
NeurIPS 2024
sym

What If the Input is Expanded in OOD Detection?

[Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2024]

Boxuan Zhang*, Jianing Zhu*, Zengmao Wang, Tongliang Liu, Bo Du and Bo Han

TL;DR: Propose a novel perspective to employ different common corruptions on the input space to expand the representation dimension for OOD detection.

[PDF]   [Project Page]   [Code]   [BibTeX]

@inproceedings{zhang2024what,
    title={What If the Input is Expanded in OOD Detection?},
    author={Zhang, Boxuan and Zhu, Jianing and Wang, Zengmao and Liu, Tongliang and Du, Bo and Han, Bo},
    booktitle={The Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
    year={2024},
}
GRSL 2024
sym

Boosting Semisupervised Object Detection in Remote-Sensing Images With Active Teaching

[IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters (GRSL), 2024]

Boxuan Zhang, Zengmao Wang and Bo Du

TL;DR: Propose to boost semi-supervised object detection with active teaching (SSOD-AT) in remote sensing images, which helps to alleviate the dependency on limited labeled images in remote sensing scenarios.

[PDF]   [Code]   [BibTeX]

@article{zhang2024boosting,
    title={Boosting Semi-Supervised Object Detection in Remote Sensing Images with Active Teaching},
    author={Zhang, Boxuan and Wang, Zengmao and Du, Bo},
    journal={IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters},
    year={2024},
    publisher={IEEE}
}

📖 Educations

  • 2022.09 - 2024.06, Master, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China.
  • 2018.09 - 2022.06, Undergraduate, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, China.

👨🏻‍💻 Research Experience

🎖 Honors and Awards

  • 2024.04 Outstanding Communist Party and Youth League member, Wuhan University.
  • 2023.10 Third Prize Winner of TBM Machine Learning Competition.