College Honors CS Graduate Student for Excellence in Research
Xiwei Xuan, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Computer Science, has received the 2025 Excellence in Graduate Student Research from the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis.
The award celebrates her outstanding doctoral research, which meets at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning and visual analytics. Advised by Distinguished Professor Kwan-Liu Ma, her work focuses on improving the efficiency, reliability and generalizability of AI systems, with the goal of aligning AI more closely with human intelligence.
She develops data-centric and human-involved methods to enable robust, interpretable decision-making, spanning both fundamental research and real-world contexts such as model bias mitigation and open-world cognition. These efforts show promise in enhancing data quality and model robustness, making AI models more effective and cheaper to train.
Demonstrating the impact and innovation of her research, she has published six first-author papers in leading journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics and ECCV, and contributed to multiple patents and federally funded research projects.
Xuan's award is part of the college's annual Graduate Student Excellence awards. They celebrate doctoral students who have made outstanding contributions to research, service, safety, and diversity, equity and inclusion.