Tyler Derr

7/2026: Our paper ‘‘Personalized Auto-Research: Towards a True AI Co-Scientist’’ is accepted in the Visionary Papers category of the inaugural ACM AI Leadership Summit

7/2026: Our paper Towards Trustworthy Retrieval Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey is accepted in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)

7/2026: I'll be serving as Academic Policies and Services (APS) Committee Co-Chair for the upcoming year in the VU Faculty Senate

6/2026: Our paper ‘‘Mapping Relative Proximity within an Internalizing Symptoms Network’’ is accepted in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders

6/2026: Preprint Adverse Online Social Interactions: A Multi-Level Evolutionary Analysis of Local Patterns, Diffusion, and Community Disruption

5/2026: Our paper ‘‘Reachability-Based Formal Verification of Graph Neural Networks with Node and Edge Features’’ is accepted at the Symposium on AI Verification (SAIV2026)

5/2026: Our work ‘‘Evaluating Large Language Models for Generating Executable Phenotyping Algorithms from Multimodal Phenotype Documentation’’ was selected for a podium abstract presentation at AMIA2026

5/2026: Congratulations to BS student Haowei Fu who received the College of Computing's 2026 Best in Program Runner-up Award!

5/2026: Honored to be seleced for the IJCAI-ECAI Early Career Spotlight (ECS), recognizing those with significant contributions and future promise in AI

5/2026: Preprint ReAD: Reinforcement-Guided Capability Distillation for Large Language Models

5/2026: Preprint SOMA: Efficient Multi-turn LLM Serving via Small Language Model

4/2026: Honored to receive support through the Google Cloud Research Credits Program for our project ‘‘A Multi-Agent AI Scientist for Autonomous Knowledge Discovery via Iterative Hypothesis Generation and Testing’’

4/2026: Preprint Sparse Personalized Text Generation with Multi-Trajectory Reasoning

4/2026: Congratulations to the team from my Project in Machine Learning course for winning 1st place in Vanderbilt's CS Immersion Showcase (sponsored by FortyAU)

4/2026: Preprint Assessing Capabilities of Large Language Models in Social Media Analytics: A Multi-task Quest

4/2026: Our paper ‘‘Risk-Controlled Event-Driven Cascading Updates for Knowledge Graph Consistency Restoration’’ is accepted at ACL2026 (Findings)

3/2026: Preprint Figure Captioning with Large Generative Models: A Survey

3/2026: Invited to serve as Doctoral Consortium Co-Chair for WSDM2027

3/2026: Our paper A Survey on Signed Network Reconstruction Modeling and its Applications is accepted in ACM Transactions on Knowledge Discovery from Data (TKDD)

3/2026: Invited to a small group faculty senate dinner with Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Provost C. Cybele Raver in the West End Tower

3/2026: Our paper A Survey of Mamba is accepted in ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)

3/2026: Our paper ‘‘Referral Required: When AI Blocks Access to Human Doctors’’ is accepted in the inaugural issue of ACM AI Letters

2/2026: Invited to serve as Publicity Co-Chair for SDM2026

1/2026: Preprint Reasoning-Based Personalized Generation for Users with Sparse Data

1/2026: Our paper Large Language Models for Conversational User Simulation: A Comprehensive Survey is accepted at EACL2026 (Main)

1/2026: Our paper Ensemble Privacy Defense for Knowledge-Intensive LLMs against Membership Inference Attacks is accepted at EACL2026 (Findings)

12/2025: Preprint Ensemble Privacy Defense for Knowledge-Intensive LLMs against Membership Inference Attacks

11/2025: Our paper SAVE-TAG: Semantic-Aware Vicinal Risk Minimization for Long-Tailed Text-Attributed Graphs is accepted at KDD2026

11/2025: Honored to receive Vanderbilt's Provost Immersion Grant for Faculty to support our work ‘‘Building Trustworthy AI: Ensuring Privacy and Security in Language Models’’

11/2025: Our paper Graph2Video: Leveraging Video Models to Model Dynamic Graph Evolution is accepted at AAAI2026

11/2025: Our paper SuperWater as a Generative AI Framework to Predict Water Molecule Positions on Protein Structures is accepted at Communications Chemistry

10/2025: Preprint Scaffold-Aware Generative Augmentation and Reranking for Enhanced Virtual Screening

10/2025: Invited to serve as a member of the IEEE Task Force on Learning for Graphs

10/2025: Recognized on the 2025 Stanford/Elsevier list of the World's Top 2% Scientists

9/2025: Preprint Large Language Models for Conversational User Simulation: A Comprehensive Survey

8/2025: Preprint Mitigating Distribution Shift in Graph-Based Android Malware Classification via Function Metadata and LLM Embeddings

8/2025: Preprint Defining and Benchmarking a Data-Centric Design Space for Brain Graph Construction

8/2025: Preprint Inverse-LLaVA: Eliminating Alignment Pre-training Through Text-to-Vision Mapping

8/2025: Invited to serve as Editorial Board Member for ACM AI Letters, a newly launched, first-of-its-kind rapid-publication journal for impactful AI reserach – check it out here

8/2025: Honored to receive a Young Investigator Best Paper Award (3rd) from KDD’25 Health Day for my Blue Sky paper ‘‘Referral Required: When AI Blocks Access to Human Doctors’’

8/2025: Former PhD Yu Wang receives 2025 ACM SIGKDD Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

8/2025: Preprint ‘‘Towards Bridging Review Sparsity in Recommendation with Textual Edge Graph Representation’’

8/2025: Honored to serve as Senator in Vanderbilt's Faculty Senate as a School of Engineering representative

7/2025: Honored to receive an NSF grant for the project Towards Well-Rounded Graph Retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

7/2025: Our paper ‘‘Explanation Difference: Bridging Procedural and Distributional Fairness’’ is accepted at AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES2025)

6/2025: Invited to give a KDD’25 Health Day Blue Sky Spotlight talk ‘‘Referral Required: When AI Blocks Access to Human Doctors’’

6/2025: Recognized as a 2024 Top Scholar by ScholarGPS, ranking in the top 0.5% worldwide overall and ranked top 50 in Data Mining over the past five years

6/2025: Our paper ‘‘Edges Matter: An Analysis of Graph Time-Series Representations for Temporal Networks’’ is accepted in IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering (TNSE)

5/2025: Our paper ‘‘Personalization of Large Language Models: A Survey’’ is accepted in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)

5/2025: Our paper ‘‘BTS: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tie Strength Prediction’’ is accepted at KDD2025

5/2025: Honored to be selected as one of the inaugural Vanderbilt CARES Fellows to work towards enhancing student well-being and fostering a more supportive campus environment.

5/2025: Preprint ‘‘Amplifying Your Social Media Presence: Personalized Influential Content Generation with LLMs’’

5/2025: Preprint ‘‘SimAug: Enhancing Recommendation with Pretrained Language Models for Dense and Balanced Data Augmentation’’

4/2025: Our paper Advancements in Ligand-Based Virtual Screening through the Synergistic Integration of Graph Neural Networks and Expert-Crafted Descriptors is accepted in the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (JCIM)

4/2025: Honored to be selected as the sole recipient of Vanderbilt’s 2025 Career Catalyst Impact Award

4/2025: Awarded NSF grant to support student travel for US-based students to attend SDM2025

3/2025: Xin (Allen) Wang successfully defended his MS thesis ‘‘Data-Centric AI for Small Molecule Drug Discovery’’ – congratulations! Next Position: PhD in Computational Biology & Biomedical Informatics at Yale University

3/2025: Xueqi Cheng successfully defended his MS thesis ‘‘Edge-Centric Network Analytics’’ – congratulations! Next Position: PhD in Computer Science at Florida State University

3/2025: Qinwen Ge successfully defended her MS thesis ‘‘Enhanced Brain Graph Construction in Neuroimaging: A Data-Centric AI Approach’’ Next Position: staying for her PhD in Computer Science at Vanderbilt University

3/2025: Yuying Zhao successfully defended her PhD dissertation ‘‘Learning Beyong Utility: Fairness, Explainability, and Diversity’’ – congratulations, Dr. Zhao! Next Position: Advanced AI Research Scientist Senior Manager at Accenture

3/2025 Our work SuperWater: Predicting Water Molecule Positions on Protein Structures by Generative AI was accepted and presented at NVIDIA GTC AI Conference

3/2025: Our demo paper Real-Time Freeway Traffic Anomalous Event Detection System via Radar Detector Sensors is accepted at ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS2025)

2/2025: Our workshop Machine Learning on Graphs in the Era of Artificial General Intelligence is accepted at KDD2025

2/2025: Preprint Towards Trustworthy Retrieval Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey

1/2025: Our paper Signed Network Dataset Repository: Extracting Signed Relations from Social Networks is accepted at IEEE ICC2025

1/2025: Our paper A Large-scale Training Paradigm for Graph Generative Models is accepted at ICLR2025

1/2025: Our paper ‘‘Demystifying the Power of Large Language Models in Graph Generation’’ is accepted at NAACL2025 Findings