Currently, I’m a third year Ph.D. student in Computer Science (CS) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, advised by Prof. Quanshi Zhang. Previously, I enrolled in the Dual Degree Program at University of Michigan - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute (UM-SJTU JI), in which I obtained a B.S.Eng. degree in CS at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a B.S.Eng. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

My research interests include:

• Explainable AI (XAI)
• Machine Learning
• Computer Vision
• Natural Language Processing

News

• [2024.10] Remote talk at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) with Prof. Quanshi Zhang.
• [2024.09] Talk at “AI+X” National Excellent PhD Forum at Peking University.
• [2024.09] One paper (see Project page) accepted by NeurIPS 2024!

Publications

Conference papers

(* indicates equal contribution)

• Towards the Dynamics of a DNN Learning Symbolic Interactions
  Qihan Ren*, Junpeng Zhang*, Yang Xu, Yue Xin, Dongrui Liu, and Quanshi Zhang
  NeurIPS 2024 / Paper / Zhihu / Project page

• Where We Have Arrived in Proving the Emergence of Sparse Interaction Primitives in DNNs
  Qihan Ren, Jiayang Gao, Wen Shen, and Quanshi Zhang
  ICLR 2024 / Paper / Code / Zhihu / Project page

• Towards the Difficulty for a Deep Neural Network to Learn Concepts of Different Complexities
  Dongrui Liu*, Huiqi Deng*, Xu Cheng, Qihan Ren, Kangrui Wang, and Quanshi Zhang
  NeurIPS 2023 / Paper / Code

• Bayesian Neural Networks Avoid Encoding Perturbation-sensitive and Complex Concepts
  Qihan Ren*, Huiqi Deng*, Yunuo Chen, Siyu Lou, and Quanshi Zhang
  ICML 2023 / Paper / Code / Video

• Discovering and Explaining the Representation Bottleneck of DNNs
  Huiqi Deng*, Qihan Ren*, Hao Zhang, and Quanshi Zhang
  ICLR 2022 (Oral) / Paper / Code / Video / Zhihu

• Interpreting Representation Quality of DNNs for 3D Point Cloud Processing
  Wen Shen, Qihan Ren, Dongrui Liu, and Quanshi Zhang
  NeurIPS 2021 / Paper / Code / Video

Journal papers

• Rotation-Equivariant Quaternion Neural Networks for 3D Point Cloud Processing
  Wen Shen, Zhihua Wei, Qihan Ren, Binbin Zhang, Shikun Huang, Jiaqi Fan, and Quanshi Zhang
  IEEE T-PAMI 2024 / Paper

Books

• Engaged in the writing of the book “Introduction to Explainable Artificial Intelligence” (in Chinese 可解释人工智能导论) as a chapter co-author.
  Book link

Invited Talks

• [2024.10] Can inference logic of a neural network be faithfully explained as symbolic concepts? Remote talk at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) with Prof. Quanshi Zhang.
• [2024.09] Theory and dynamical analysis of symbolic concepts encoded by deep neural networks. “AI+X” National Excellent PhD Forum (“AI+X”全国优秀博士生论坛) at Peking University.
• [2022.04] Discovering and explaining the representation bottleneck of DNNs. At TechBeat with Huiqi Deng. See recording link.
• [2022.03] Discovering and explaining the representation bottleneck of DNNs. At BAIYULAN OPEN AI, with Huiqi Deng. See recording link.