I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Professor Tarek Abdelzaher. My research lies at the intersection of large language models (LLMs), agent-based modeling, and social simulation. Specifically, I design persona-grounded LLM agents that simulate ideological behavior, belief shifts, and community-level dynamics in response to external events such as propaganda, misinformation, and persuasive narratives.
I work closely with Professor Dilek Hakkani-Tür and Professor Heng Ji, exploring research directions in natural language understanding, multimodal retrieval, and social behavior modeling.
My long-term goal is to develop computational frameworks that bridge LLMs and social science, enabling interpretable, scalable, and language-aware simulations of complex human interactions.
Education
Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL
(Expected May 2027)
Master of Science in Data Science
Columbia University, New York, NY
(May 2022)
Bachelor of Engineering
Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, CN
(July 2019)
Work Experience
Applied Science Intern | Causal Inference, Persona Modeling
Amazon Alexa AI | Summer 2025
Data Science Intern | Data Mining, User Segmentation
ByteDance | Summer 2022
Publications
You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.
First-authored Publications
Xinyi Liu, Dachun Sun, Yi R Fung, Dilek Hakkani-Tür, Tarek Abdelzaher
SIGDIAL 2025
GPSocio: A Transformer-based General-purpose Social Network Representation System
Xinyi Liu, Dachun Sun, Tarek Abdelzaher
ASONAM 2025
Beliefs in Motion: Simulating Opinion Dynamics via LLM-Powered Community Reactions
Xinyi Liu, Dachun Sun, Dilek Hakkani Tur, Tarek Abdelzaher
ASONAM 2025
Influence Message Wargaming in the Metaverse: Towards LLM-Based Persuasion and Counter-Persuasion
Xinyi Liu, Dachun Sun, Tarek Abdelzaher
IEEE MetaCom 2025
Xinyi Liu, Ruijie Wang, Dachun Sun, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Tarek Abdelzaher
WWW workshop 2025
Xinyi Liu, Ruijie Wang, Dachun Sun, Jinning Li, Christina Youn, You Lyu, Jianyuan Zhan, Dayou Wu, Xinhe Xu, Mingjun Liu, Xinshuo Lei, Zhihao Xu, Yutong Zhang, Zehao Li, Qikai Yang, Tarek Abdelzaher
IEEE CIC 2023
Xinyi Liu, Jinning Li, Dachun Sun, Ruijie Wang, Tarek Abdelzaher, Matt Brown, Anthony Barricelli, Matthias Kirchner, Arslan Basharat
ICWSM workshop 2023
Xinyi Liu, Ke Mei, and Shujuan Yu
IEEE ITNEC 2020
Co-authored Publications
The Irrational LLM: Implementing Cognitive Agents with Weighted Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Dachun Sun, You Lyu, Jinning Li, Xinyi Liu, Denizhan Kara, Christian Lebiere, Tarek Abdelzaher
ICCCN 2025
Dachun Sun, Jinning Li, Xinyi Liu, You Lyu, Hongjue Zhao, Denizhan Kara and Tarek Abdelzaher
ICCCN 2025
Anatomy of Conflict: a Tool for Understanding Conflict Dynamics from Social Media Data
Dachun Sun, Jinning Li, You Lyu, Xinyi Liu, Christina Youn, Tarek Abdelzaher
IEEE SmartNets 2025
Modeling Online Ideological Community Dynamics with Recurrent Variational Graph Auto-Encoders
Dachun Sun, You Lyu, Jinning Li, Xinyi Liu, Tarek Abdelzaher
IEEE IBDAP 2025
Shujuan Yu, Xinyi Liu, Jun Cao, and Yun Zhang
Entropy 2021
Selected Demo
DARPA INCAS: Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking
A multi-year project on understanding influence operations in low-dimensional information spaces and their impact on populations.
- Developed an interactive demo system that integrates ideology embedding, narrative pathway discovery, and influencer detection.
- Deployed the system at: incas.csl.illinois.edu, supporting visual exploration and interactive analysis of influence campaigns.
