Denghui Zhang · 张登辉 · Hoboken, NJ

I study human, data,
artificial systems,
and their interactions.

I’m an Assistant Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, School of Business, also affiliated with SIAI and CRAFT. I work on making large language models safer and more trustworthy, with a focus on copyright leakage, unsafe behavior, and AI agents for finance and other regulated settings.

Get in touch → Read my work Google Scholar ↗
Portrait of Denghui Zhang
About

Greetings. I am an Assistant Professor at Stevens Institute of Technology, School of Business, also affiliated with the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) and the Center for Research toward Advancing Financial Technologies (CRAFT).

I received my Ph.D. from Rutgers University, where I was fortunate to work with Dr. Hui Xiong. Before academia, I spent time at Amazon Science, Baidu Research, and NEC Labs.

My work has appeared in top venues across machine learning and information systems — IEEE TKDE, Nature Portfolio, IEEE BigData and conference proceedings such as NeurIPS, KDD, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICML, AAAI, IJCAI, CIST.

Education
Ph.D.

Rutgers University, advised by Dr. Hui Xiong.

Research
Trustworthy GenAI

LLM mechanistics, safety, and data copyright.

Service
Area Chair

NeurIPS · ICLR · ACL · EMNLP, plus reviewing for Nature Communications, TKDE, MISQ, ISR, IJOC.

To prospective students

Feel free to email me with your CV. Once we have a mutual commitment, I will exert my utmost effort to help you grow.

Research

Building safe
and reliable
GenAI.

My work sits between two threads. On one side, I look at what large language models actually do — how they leak copyrighted text, when they behave unsafely, and how they reason under uncertainty. On the other, I build AI agents for domains that don’t forgive mistakes, like finance and other regulated settings.

News

Recent
activity.

  • 05 / 2026
    New Awarded a $100K NSF CRAFT research grant for “Token-efficient Regulation-aware Financial LLM Agent.”
  • 03 / 2026
    Invited to serve as Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026.
  • 02 / 2026
    New Preprint on Copyright Detective — a forensic system to evidence LLMs’ flickering copyright leakage risks. Learn more →
  • 01 / 2026
    Three hard-ML papers accepted to ICLR 2026.
  • 12 / 2025
    Gave a demo talk at ICIS SIG TECH workshop.
  • 12 / 2025
    Talk on copyright violation detection at NeurIPS workshop on Socially Responsible Foundation Models. Learn more →
  • 08 / 2025
    Paper on Sparse ToM covered by MIT Technology Review.
  • 08 / 2025
    Invited to serve as Area Chair for ICLR 2025.
  • 08 / 2025
    Five papers accepted to EMNLP 2025.
  • 05 / 2025
    Hosting a GenAI workshop at ICDM 2025 on fintech and regulation. Learn more →
  • 05 / 2025
    Invited to serve as Area Chair for EMNLP 2025.
  • 05 / 2025
    Check our NAACL LLM copyright tutorial slides.
  • 05 / 2025
    Position paper on handling complex copyright risks accepted by ICML 2025.
  • 09 / 2024
    Paper analyzing copyright behavior of LLMs accepted to EMNLP 2024 (Main).
  • 08 / 2024
    Presenting LLM copyright study at CIKM Data-centric AI workshop.
  • 07 / 2024
    Awarded the OpenAI Researcher Access Program.
Publications

What I’ve
written.

Also on Google Scholar.

* denotes corresponding author throughout this page.

Preprints

Journal Articles reverse chronological

A* AI Conferences per CORE · cross-checked with Google Scholar top venues

Information Systems & Other Conferences IS & domain-specific venues

Teaching

What I’ve
taught.

Graduate · Spring 2024 · Stevens Institute of Technology

Big Data Technology

MapReduce, Hadoop, Spark, streaming data, large-scale machine learning.

Undergraduate · Spring 2022 · Rutgers University

Data Warehousing & Data Mining

The foundations of data mining and machine learning, with Python, Pandas, and Orange for quick analytics.

Students

Where they
are heading.

  • Rushi Wang
    Intern · UIUC Master → Ph.D., Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
  • Jiateng Liu
    Intern · UIUC Master → Ph.D. in CS, UIUC
  • Dong Shu
    Intern · Northwestern → Ph.D. in CS, Northwestern
  • Guangwei Zhang
    Intern → Ph.D. in CS, Arizona State University
Service

Where I
serve.

Area Chair

  • NeurIPS 2026
  • ICLR 2025
  • ACL 2025
  • EMNLP 2025

Demo Chair

Workshop & Tutorial

  • Workshop on GenAI for Fintech & Regulation — ICDM 2025
  • NAACL LLM Copyright Tutorial 2025

Session Chair

  • AI-driven Business Analytics — ICIS 2023
  • Graph Learning & Social Networks — ACM SIGKDD 2022

Program Committee

  • ACM SIGKDD 2022–2024
  • ACL 2022
  • EMNLP 2024
  • AAAI 2021–2024
  • IJCAI 2021, 2022
  • WSDM 2022
  • CIKM 2020
  • ICIS, PACIS, WITS 2022

Journal Reviewer

  • Nature Communications
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE)
  • MIS Quarterly (MISQ)
  • Information Systems Research (ISR)
  • INFORMS Journal on Computing (IJOC)
Awards

Recognition
& honors.

NSF Research Grant2026

NSF Award ($100K Research Grant)

National Science Foundation · via CRAFT for “Token-efficient Regulation-aware Financial LLM Agent.”

NSF NAIRR Pilot2024

NSF NAIRR Pilot Program Award

National Science Foundation · National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot Program.

OpenAI2024

OpenAI Researcher Access Program

Selected for the OpenAI Researcher Access Program.

Teaching2024

Teaching Excellence Award

Stevens Institute of Technology · recognition for outstanding teaching performance and student engagement.

Best Student Paper2023

ICIS Best Student Paper Award

ICIS 2023 · for “Graph Learning of Multifaceted Motivations for Online Political Engagement Prediction in Counter-party Social Networks.”

Fellowship2022

Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship

Rutgers University · prestigious fellowship awarded to outstanding doctoral candidates.

Scholarship2022

Student Scholarship

INFORMS Workshop on Data Science · competitive scholarship for workshop participation.

Contact

Get in touch.

I welcome inquiries from prospective students, collaborators, and anyone interested in my research. Please feel free to reach out.

Email
dzhang42@stevens.edu
Office
Hoboken, NJ
Stevens Institute of Technology
Google Scholar ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Twitter / X ↗
Stevens Institute of Technology campus in Hoboken, NJ, overlooking Manhattan across the Hudson River
Stevens · Hoboken, NJ