PhD Candidate Qu Wenjie Named 2026 MLCommons Rising Star

Qu Wenjie, a PhD candidate in Computer Science, has been selected as a 2026 ML and Systems Rising Star by MLCommons, an honour recognising early-career researchers shaping the future of machine learning and systems research. 

Qu joins a cohort of 39 researchers from 26 institutions worldwide, chosen from a pool of more than 175 applicants. This programme connects participants with leaders across academia and industry, and this year’s group presented their work at the Rising Stars Workshop, hosted at AMD’s headquarters in Santa Clara from 30 - 31 July.

His research sits at the intersection of machine learning, security, and cryptography, focused on making large language models trustworthy and verifiable. Working under the supervision of NUS Presidential Young Professor Zhang Jiaheng and closely with Professor Dawn Song, he builds systems for auditing and proving the correctness of AI services, including zero-knowledge proofs for model inference and training, with work published in venues such as IEEE S&P, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, and NDSS.

"I am deeply honoured to receive this recognition, which reflects not only my past work but also the support of my advisor, mentors, collaborators, friends, and the NUS Computing community," said Qu. "My research focuses on building secure and trustworthy AI systems, particularly understanding and mitigating emerging security risks in large language models and autonomous agents. Going forward, I hope to develop principled security foundations that enable increasingly capable AI agents to operate safely and reliably in the real world.”

As AI agents take on more autonomous roles, from executing transactions to making decisions with real-world consequences, Qu's work on verifiable AI systems addresses a problem that will only grow more pressing: how to trust what these systems are doing.