Andong Hua

I am a second-year PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at UCSB, advised by Prof. Yao Qin. I am also a member of the REAL AI Lab. Previously, I worked as a Research Engineer at TuSimple, focusing on developing perception systems for autonomous driving trucks. Prior to that, I obtained my Master's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UCLA.

My research interests broadly lie in the areas of machine learning and artificial intelligence, with a focus on:

• Robustness and safety in large language models, vision models, and multimodal models.
• AI for healthcare, such as nutrition estimation.

🚀 I am actively looking for a 2025 internship opportunity.
Please feel free to reach out if you have any opportunities or would like to connect!

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Publications

NutriBench: A Dataset for Evaluating Large Language Models in Nutrition Estimation from Meal Descriptions.
Andong Hua*, Mehak Preet Dhaliwal*, Laya Pullela, Ryan Burke, Yao Qin
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.
[Paper] [Project Page] [Data]

Improving Adversarial Transferability in MLLMs via Dynamic Vision-Language Alignment Attack.
Chenhe Gu, Jindong Gu, Andong Hua, Yao Qin
Preprint, 2024.
[Paper]

Initialization Matters for Adversarial Transfer Learning.
Andong Hua, Jindong Gu, Zhiyu Xue, Nicholas Carlini, Eric Wong, Yao Qin
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.
[Paper] [Code]

Experience

University of California, Santa Barbara

PhD Student, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Jan 2024 – Present

University of California, Santa Barbara

Research Assistant (RA)

Feb 2023 – Jan 2024

TuSimple

Research Engineer, Perception Team

Jun 2022 – Feb 2023

University of California, Los Angeles

Master Student, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Sep 2020 – Jun 2022

University of Nottingham

Bachelor Student, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Sep 2016 – Jun 2020