The title of his Ph.D. thesis proposal is “Theory and Applications of Adversarial and Structured Knowledge Learning”. His qualifying exam committee consisted of C.-C. Jay Kuo (Chair), Keith Michael Chugg, Keith Jenkins, Rahul Jain and Stefanos Nikolaidis.

Abstract of thesis proposal:

Deep learning has brought impressive improvements for many tasks, thanks to end-to-end data-driven optimization. However, people have little control over the system during training and limited understanding about the structure of knowledge being learned. In this thesis proposal, we study theory and applications of adversarial and structured knowledge learning: 1) learning adversarial knowledge with human interaction or by incorporating human-in-the-loop; 2) learning structured knowledge by modelling contexts and users’ preferences.

In the first category, our research topics include human-robot adversarial learning; Human-guided curriculum reinforcement learning and PortraitGAN for simultaneous emotion and modality manipulations. In the second category, a real-world compatible recommendation problem was tackled with structural graph representation and deep metric learning. The two categories are also related in the sense that structured knowledge often help lay a solid foundation, on which adversarial knowledge can be learned more successfully. Additionally, we contribute technically by open-sourcing relevant platforms.