Associate Professor Tongliang Liu
People_

Associate Professor Tongliang Liu

BEng, PhD
ARC Future Fellow
Director of Sydney Artificial Intelligence Centre
Director of Trustworthy Machine Learning Lab
School of Computer Science
Associate Professor Tongliang Liu

Tongliang Liu is an Associate Professor in Machine Learning with the School of Computer Science and The Director of Sydney AI Centre at the University of Sydney. He is broadly interested in the fields of trustworthy machine learning and its interdisciplinary applications, with a particular emphasis on learning with noisy labels, adversarial learning, causal representation learning, transfer learning, unsupervised learning, foundation model safety, and statistical deep learning theory. He has authored and co-authored more than 200 research articles including ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, AAAI, IJCAI, JMLR, and TPAMI. He is/was a senior meta-reviewer for NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, and IJCAI, meta-reviewer for NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, UAI, AAAI, IJCAI, and KDD, and was a notable AC for NeurIPS and ICLR. He is a co-Editor-in-Chief for Neural Networks, an Associate Editor of IEEE TPAMI, TIP, ACM Computing Surveys, and TMLR, and is on the Editorial Boards of JMLR and MLJ. He is a recipient of CORE Award for Outstanding Research Contribution in 2024, the IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch Award in 2023, the Future Fellowship Award from Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2022, the Top-40 Early Achievers by The Australian in 2020, and the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from ARC in 2018.

In our daily lives, we make many decisions. Some are simple, but some are not. Why not let machines help? This is the principle underlying Dr Tongliang Liu's research into machine learning. He designs effective, efficient, and understandable learning algorithms - the processes machines use to "think" through datasets in order to "decide" how to respond to a problem.

"Machine learning is similar to human learning. As humans, when we encounter a problem, we think through our store of learned experience and knowledge to identify a rule that we think will apply to this situation, and we base our decision on that.

"Similarly, in machine learning, a machine presented with a problem will run algorithms ('think') through data ('experience and knowledge') to identify an applicable hypothesis ('rule'), and base its response ('decision') on that.

"My research aims to provide mathematical justifications for existing learning algorithms, and to design more effective and efficient learning algorithms for real-world problems in data mining and computer vision.

"For example, as we humans get older and gain more experience and knowledge, the decisions we make become more reliable. A similar phenomenon applies to machine learning as the amount of data collected increases. My research focuses on understanding this process, and how we can exploit it to make machine-made decisions more reliable.

"The ultimate goal would be to make machines as clever as humans. If we can develop machines that have even some of the decision-making capabilities of humans, this could reduce human labour and inconvenience and improve our quality of life. This is what motivates me to do research in machine learning.

"What excites me about this field is that recently some machine-learning algorithms have outperformed humans in several difficult problems, such as face recognition and playing the board game Go.

"I have been working in this field since 2012, and joined the University of Sydney in early 2017. The outstanding research staff and students here inspire me enormously. I believe that together we can achieve great things."

COMP5318- Machine Learning and Data Mining

COMP5328- Advanced Machine Learning

  • Award for Outstanding Research Contribution - CORE 2024

  • IEEE AI's 10 to Watch Award - IEEE 2023

  • Eureka Prize for Emerging Leaders shortlist - Australian Museum 2023

  • Notable Area Chair - ICLR 2023

  • Future Fellowship Award - ARC 2022

  • OPPO Faculty Award - OPPO 2022

  • Meituan Faculty Research Award for Collaboration Exploration 2022

  • Best Paper Honorable Mention - IEEE MMSP 2022

  • Best Paper Award - ACM Mobiarch 2022

  • Early Career Research Excellence – Faculty of Engineering, University of Sydney 2021

  • Best VisNotes Paper Award - PacificVis 2021
  • Bioengineering and Digital Science Catalyst Award - Cardiovascular Initiative 2021
  • Expert Reviewer - ICML 2021
  • Early Career Researcher Award Honourable Mention - Australian Pattern Recognition Society (APRS) 2020
  • Top 10% of high-scoring reviewers - NeurIPS 2020
  • Named in the Early Achievers Leadboard - The Australian 2020
  • Best Paper Award - IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME) 2019
  • J G Russell Award Shortlisted - Australian Academy of Science (AAS) 2019
  • Discovery Early Career Research Award - Australian Research Council (ARC) 2019
  • One of the top 10 reviewers in 2018 – IET Computer Vision 2018
  • Distinguished Paper Candidate - International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) 2017
  • IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics Outstanding Reviewer - IEEE 2016
  • Best Paper Award - IEEE International Conference on Information Science & Tech (ICIST) 2014
  • Computational Statistics & Data Analysis Outstanding Reviewer - ELSEVIER 2014
Project titleResearch student
Estimating heterogeneous treatment effect in cross-sectional and panel settingsJack Ting-tse CHEN
Aligning with Human Objectives via Reinforcement LearningLi HE
Generalisable Machine LearningZhuo HUANG
Research of Transformer about Hidden Principle and Efficiency ImprovementLeo LI
Towards Trustworthy Pattern Mining from Unreliable EnvironmentsMuyang LI
Efficient Robustness Evaluation via Jailbreaking Attack and Robustness Enhancement by Mitigating Catastrophic OverfittingRunqi LIN
Causality-inspired transfer learningYexiong LIN
Answerability, Calibration and Grounding Guarantees for Natural Language Question AnsweringKent O'SULLIVAN
Machine Learning Accelerated Molecular DynamicsJun WANG
Towards Explainable Online Continual LearningHang YU
3D Editing in Gaussian SplattingLongjie ZHAO
Reliable deep model validation using cheap dataJiyang ZHENG
3D Referring Comprehension and SegmentationMike ZHOU

Publications

Journals

  • Wu, S., Zhou, T., Du, Y., Yu, J., Han, B., Liu, T. (2024). A Time-Consistency Curriculum for Learning from Instance-Dependent Noisy Labels. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. [More Information]
  • Zhang, J., Song, B., Wang, H., Han, B., Liu, T., Liu, L., Sugiyama, M. (2024). BadLabel: A Robust Perspective on Evaluating and Enhancing Label-Noise Learning. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 46(6), 4398-4409. [More Information]
  • Li, M., Zhou, T., Han, B., Liu, T., Liang, X., Zhao, J., Gong, C. (2024). Class-wise Contrastive Prototype Learning for Semi-Supervised Classification under Intersectional Class Mismatch. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. [More Information]

Conferences

  • Zhou, D., Wang, N., Yang, H., Gao, X., Liu, T. (2023). Phase-aware Adversarial Defense for Improving Adversarial Robustness. 40th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2023, NA: ML Research Press.
  • Kim, J., Liu, T., Yacef, K. (2022). Improving Supervised Learning in Conversational Analysis through Reusing Preprocessing Data as Auxiliary Supervisors. ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, : SPIE.
  • An,, X., Deng,, J., Guo,, J., Feng,, Z., Zhu,, X., Yang,, J., Liu, T. (2022). Killing Two Birds with One Stone: Efficient and Robust Training of Face Recognition CNNs by Partial FC. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, : IEEE Computer Society.

2024

  • Wu, S., Zhou, T., Du, Y., Yu, J., Han, B., Liu, T. (2024). A Time-Consistency Curriculum for Learning from Instance-Dependent Noisy Labels. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. [More Information]
  • Zhang, J., Song, B., Wang, H., Han, B., Liu, T., Liu, L., Sugiyama, M. (2024). BadLabel: A Robust Perspective on Evaluating and Enhancing Label-Noise Learning. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 46(6), 4398-4409. [More Information]
  • Li, M., Zhou, T., Han, B., Liu, T., Liang, X., Zhao, J., Gong, C. (2024). Class-wise Contrastive Prototype Learning for Semi-Supervised Classification under Intersectional Class Mismatch. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. [More Information]

2023

  • Yang, S., Wu, S., Yang, E., Han, B., Liu, Y., Xu, M., Niu, G., Liu, T. (2023). A Parametrical Model for Instance-Dependent Label Noise. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 45(12), 14055-14068. [More Information]
  • Li, X., Xia, X., Zhu, F., Liu, T., Zhang, X., Liu, C. (2023). Dynamics-aware loss for learning with label noise. Pattern Recognition, 144, 109835. [More Information]
  • Xia, X., Han, B., Wang, N., Deng, J., Li, J., Mao, Y., Liu, T. (2023). Extended T: Learning With Mixed Closed-Set and Open-Set Noisy Labels. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 45(3), 3047-3058. [More Information]

2022

  • Cai, S., Hong, S., Shen, J., Liu, T. (2022). A Machine Learning Approach for Predicting Human Preference for Graph Drawings. Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications, 26(4), 447-470. [More Information]
  • Cai, S., Hong, S., Xia, X., Liu, T., Huang, W. (2022). A machine learning approach for predicting human shortest path task performance. Visual Informatics, 6(2), 50-61. [More Information]
  • Yang, S., Wu, S., Liu, T., Xu, M. (2022). Bridging the Gap Between Few-Shot and Many-Shot Learning via Distribution Calibration. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 44(12), 9830-9843. [More Information]

2021

  • Du, Y., Hsieh, M., Liu, T., Tao, D. (2021). A Grover-search based quantum learning scheme for classification. New Journal of Physics, 23(2), 23020. [More Information]
  • Cai, S., Hong, S., Shen, J., Liu, T. (2021). A Machine Learning Approach for Predicting Human Preference for Graph Layouts. 14th IEEE Pacific Visualization Symposium (PacificVis 2021), Piscataway: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]
  • Zhu, Z., Liu, T., Liu, Y. (2021). A Second-Order Approach to Learning with Instance-Dependent Label Noise. 2021 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2021), Piscataway: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]

2020

  • Liu, X., Wang, L., Zhu, X., Li, M., Zhu, E., Liu, T., Liu, L., Dou, Y., Yin, J. (2020). Absent Multiple Kernel Learning Algorithms. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 42(6), 1303-1316. [More Information]
  • Yang, E., Liu, T., Deng, C., Tao, D. (2020). Adversarial Examples for Hamming Space Search. IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 50(4), 1473-1484. [More Information]
  • Gan, S., Luo, Y., Wen, Y., Liu, T., Hu, H. (2020). Deep Heterogeneous Multi-Task Metric Learning for Visual Recognition and Retrieval. 28th ACM Multimedia Conference (MM 2020), New York: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). [More Information]

2019

  • Lei, T., Jia, X., Liu, T., Liu, S., Meng, H., Nandi, A. (2019). Adaptive Morphological Reconstruction for Seeded Image Segmentation. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 28(11), 5510-5523. [More Information]
  • Xia, X., Liu, T., Wang, N., Han, B., Gong, C., Niu, G., Sugiyma, M. (2019). Are Anchor Points Really Indispensable in Label-Noise Learning. 33th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019), Canada: Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation.
  • He, F., Liu, T., Tao, D. (2019). Control Batch Size and Learning Rate to Generalize Well: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence. 33th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019), Canada: Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation.

2018

  • Gong, C., Liu, T., Tang, Y., Yang, J., Yang, J., Tao, D. (2018). A Regularization Approach for Instance-Based Superset Label Learning. IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 48(3), 967-978. [More Information]
  • Yu, X., Liu, T., Gong, M., Batmanghelich, K., Tao, D. (2018). An Efficient and Provable Approach for Mixture Proportion Estimation Using Linear Independence Assumption. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2018), Salt Lake City, Utah: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]
  • Shen, X., Tian, X., Liu, T., Xu, F., Tao, D. (2018). Continuous Dropout. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 29(9), 3926-3937. [More Information]

2017

  • Liu, T., Tao, D., Song, M., Maybank, S. (2017). Algorithm-Dependent Generalization Bounds for Multi-Task Learning. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 39(2), 227-241. [More Information]
  • Liu, T., Lugosi, G., Neu, G., Tao, D. (2017). Algorithmic stability and hypothesis complexity. The 34th International Conference on Machine Learning, (ICML 2017), online: Proceedings of Machine Learning Research.
  • Ma, K., Liu, W., Liu, T., Wang, Z., Tao, D. (2017). dipIQ: Blind Image Quality Assessment by Learning-to-Rank Discriminable Image Pairs. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 26(8), 3951-3964. [More Information]

2016

  • Liu, T., Tao, D. (2016). Classification with Noisy Labels by Importance Reweighting. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 38(3), 447-461. [More Information]
  • Liu, T., Tao, D., Xu, D. (2016). Dimensionality-Dependent Generalization Bounds for k-Dimensional Coding Schemes. Neural Computation, 28(10), 2213-2249. [More Information]
  • Xiong, H., Liu, T., Tao, D. (2016). Diversified Dynamical Gaussian Process Latent Variable Model for Video Repair. 30th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2016), United States: AAAI Press.

2015

  • Gong, C., Liu, T., Tao, D., Fu, K., Tu, E., Yang, J. (2015). Deformed Graph Laplacian for Semisupervised Learning. IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 26(10), 2261-2274. [More Information]
  • Li, Y., Tian, X., Liu, T., Tao, D. (2015). Multi-task model and feature joint learning. 24th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015), Buenos Aires: AAAI Press.
  • Luo, Y., Liu, T., Tao, D., Xu, C. (2015). Multiview matrix completion for multilabel image classification. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 24(8), 2355-2368. [More Information]

2014

  • Luo, Y., Liu, T., Tao, D., Xu, C. (2014). Decomposition-based transfer distance metric learning for image classification. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 23(9), 3789-3801. [More Information]
  • Shao, M., Li, S., Liu, T., Tao, D., Huang, T., Fu, Y. (2014). Learning relative features through adaptive pooling for image classification. 2014 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo Workshops (ICMEW 2014), Piscataway, New Jersey: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]
  • Liu, T., Tao, D. (2014). On the robustness and generalization of Cauchy regression. 2014 4th IEEE International Conference on Information Science and Technology (ICIST 2014), Piscataway: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [More Information]

Selected Grants

2024

  • Visual methods for advanced automation of underwater manipulation, Ila V, Liu T, Williams S, Australian Research Council (ARC)/Linkage Projects (LP)
  • Self-supervised feature learning for rapid processing of marine imagery, Williams S, Liu T, Marzinelli E, Australian Research Council (ARC)/Linkage Projects (LP)

2023

  • Modelling Adversarial Noise for Trustworthy Data Analytics, Liu T, Australian Research Council (ARC)/Future Fellowships (FT)
  • AI-enhanced Online Shopping, Bao W, Ge L, Liu T, Yuan D, University of Sydney/Industry Collaboration Program

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