Tong Wu

(765)-720-4989     tongwu@princeton.edu

I am a PhD candidate at Princeton University, advised by Prof. Prateek Mittal. During my PhD, I have worked at Zoom, Microsoft, and NEC Labs as a research intern. Previously, I earned my Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Washington University in St. Louis, advised by Prof. Yevgeniy Vorobeychik.

My research focuses on the safety challenges posed by increasingly powerful and intelligent large language models (LLMs). I am particularly interested in developing simple, scalable methods grounded in rigorous theoretical principles. Specifically, my work spans across:

  • Reasoning Control: I have recently become particularly excited about the strong reasoning capabilities of LLMs. My current work focuses on developing scalable approaches to enhance their reliability and safety through Thinking Intervention, a novel paradigm for steering the thinking trajectory within reasoning LLMs.
  • Robust and Private RAG: I have developed certifiably robust retrieval-augmented generation systems (RobustRAG), where the generated responses are provably robust against misinformation in the retrieved documents. I have also designed differential private in-context learning (DP-ICL) that applies similar insights to ensure privacy guarantees.
  • Instruction Hierarchy: I have worked on enhancing instruction hierarchy through architectural innovations (ISE) and robust verification mechanisms (Task Shield) that correctly prioritize critical instructions in LLM agents.

Selected Publications

* Equal contribution

Other Publications

Miscellaneous

  • REVIEWING:

    • ICLR'22,24,25; NeurIPS'22,23,24; ICML'23,24,25; CVPR'25; ECCV'24; WCAV'22,24,25; KDD'22; AAAI'21; S&P'21; IJCV.

  • TEACHING EXPERIENCE:

    • Information Security (Spring 2024), Princeton University.
    • Teaching Assistant of Introduction to Machine Learning (Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021), Washington University in St. Louis.

  • HONORS & AWARDS:

    • Princeton First Year Fellowship, 2021
    • Research Excellence Award at Washington University, 2021
    • AAMAS 2021 Student Scholarship, 2021
    • Washington University Undergraduate Research Conference Travel Award, 2020
    • Member of Tau Beta Pi Association, 2019, 2020, 2021