Andong Hua

PhD student @ UC Santa Barbara

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.

NEWS!

  • Aug. 2025: My co-first author paper on prompt sensitivity in LLM evaluation has been accepted to EMNLP 2025 (Main)
  • June. 2025: Excited to join the Amazon Smart Vehicle Team as an Applied Scientist Intern, focusing on prompt optimization for function calling!
  • Jan. 2025: My co-first author paper on benchmarking LLMs for nutrition estimation from meal descriptions has been accepted to ICLR 2025!
  • Feb. 2024: First author paper on adversarial transfer learning is accepted to CVPR 2024.

Publications

Flaw or Artifact? Rethinking Prompt Sensitivity in Evaluating LLMs.
Andong Hua*, Kenan Tang*, Chenhe Gu, Jindong Gu, Eric Wong, Yao Qin
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP, Main Conference), 2025.
[Paper]
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