😊 About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, co-supervised by Prof. Haibo Hu and Dr. Minxin Du.
My research focuses on the security, privacy, and reliability of large language models (LLMs).
Before starting my Ph.D., I received my B.Eng. in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU) in 2024.

🔬 Research Interests

• Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models (LLMs):
  Designing efficient and robust algorithms that enable LLMs to selectively forget specific data or behaviors while preserving their overall capability.
  My research explores two key scenarios:
  • 🧩 Single Unlearning: Removing a specific set of data or knowledge from a pre-trained model in a one-time unlearning request, ensuring minimal performance degradation.
  • 🔁 Continual Unlearning: Extending unlearning to long sequences of deletion requests, addressing cumulative forgetting, stability, and reversibility issues over time.
• LLM Security and Trustworthiness:
  Investigating the robustness of LLMs against unlearning attacks like relearning and quantization perturbations to ensure safety and integrity in real-world applications.

🔥 News

• 🗓️ August 2025 — Our paper is accepted to EMNLP 2025 (Main Conference)!
• 🗓️ June 2025 — Invited to review for ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB).
• 🗓️ June 2025 — Invited by EMNLP to serve as a secondary (external) reviewer.
• 🗓️ May 2025 — My personal homepage officially launched!

📝 Publications

• Does Math Reasoning Improve General LLM Capabilities? Understanding Transferability of LLM Reasoning
  arXiv preprint: 2507.00432 • PDF
  Maggie Huan, Yuetai Li, Tuney Zheng, Xiaoyu Xu, Seungone Kim, Minxin Du, Radha Poovendran, Graham Neubig, Xiang Yue

• Unlearning Isn’t Deletion: Investigating Reversibility of Machine Unlearning in LLMs
  arXiv preprint: 2505.16831 • PDF
  Xiaoyu Xu, Xiang Yue, Yang Liu, Qingqing Ye, Haibo Hu, Minxin Du

• OBLIVIATE: Robust and Practical Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models
  EMNLP 2025 (Main Conference): 2505.04416 • PDF
  Xiaoyu Xu, Minxin Du, Qingqing Ye, Haibo Hu

📖 Educations

• 2020.09 – 2024.06, Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU)
• 2024.09 – present, Ph.D. Candidate, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

🎯 Interests

• Fitness enthusiast: Passionate about strength training, cardio, and maintaining a healthy lifestyle.
• Music lover: Enjoy listening to Mandopop artists such as Jay Chou, G.E.M., JJ Lin, and David Tao.