LAIR

Lehigh AI Research Lab

Computer Science and Engineering

Lehigh University

Welcome to the Lehigh AI Research Lab (LAIR), led by Prof. Lichao Sun at Lehigh University. Prof. Sun is also an Adjunct Professor at Mayo Clinic.

We are interested in making machine learning and deep learning algorithms more reliable, robust, efficient, and interpretable. Our research spans:

Trustworthy AI — robustness, fairness, privacy, and safety of AI systems
Medical AI — AI-powered healthcare and clinical applications
Generative AI / LLM — large language models, AIGC, and their responsible deployment
Federated Learning — privacy-preserving collaborative machine learning
Reinforcement Learning — efficient and safe decision-making algorithms

Our work directly benefits applications in computer vision, natural language processing, graph networks, and privacy-preserving machine learning systems.

Prof. Sun received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2020, under the supervision of Prof. Philip S. Yu. He was the recipient of the 2024 OpenAI Researcher Access Program Award, 2024 Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research Award, 2023 SIGIR Best Paper Honorable Mention Award, and the NSF CRII Award.

[Open Positions] We are recruiting Ph.D. students, undergraduate students, and visiting scholars/students. Please feel free to send an email with your CV to lis221 [at] lehigh [dot] edu.

news

Mar 25, 2026	[Recruiting] We are looking for highly motivated PhD students, undergraduate students, and visiting scholars. Please send your CV to lis221 [at] lehigh [dot] edu.
Mar 01, 2026	Dr. Claw is released! Our AI research workspace has reached 670+ GitHub stars. Check it out at github.com/OpenLAIR/dr-claw.
May 01, 2024	Prof. Lichao Sun received the 2024 OpenAI Researcher Access Program Award.
Jan 15, 2024	Prof. Lichao Sun received the 2024 Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research Award.
Aug 01, 2023	Our paper received the SIGIR 2023 Best Paper Honorable Mention Award.
Jun 01, 2023	Prof. Lichao Sun received the NSF CRII Award.

selected publications

Nat Med
A generalist vision–language foundation model for diverse biomedical tasks

Kai Zhang, Rong Zhou, Eashan Adhikarla, and 20 more authors

Nature Medicine, 2024

Abs Bib

Traditional biomedical artificial intelligence (AI) models, designed for specific tasks or modalities, often exhibit limited flexibility in real-world deployment and struggle to utilize holistic information. Generalist AI holds the potential to address these limitations due to its versatility in interpreting different data types and generating tailored outputs for diverse needs. Here, we describe BiomedGPT, the first open-source and lightweight vision-language foundation model, designed as a generalist capable of performing various biomedical tasks. BiomedGPT achieved state-of-the-art results in 16 out of 25 experiments while maintaining a computing-friendly model scale.
@article{zhang2024biomedgpt, title = {A generalist vision--language foundation model for diverse biomedical tasks}, author = {Zhang, Kai and Zhou, Rong and Adhikarla, Eashan and Yan, Zhiling and Liu, Yixin and Yu, Jun and Liu, Zhengliang and Chen, Xun and Davison, Brian D and Ren, Hui and Huang, Jing and Chen, Chen and Zhou, Yuyin and Fu, Sunyang and Liu, Wei and Liu, Tianming and Li, Xiang and Chen, Yong and He, Lifang and Zou, James and Li, Quanzheng and Liu, Hongfang and Sun, Lichao}, journal = {Nature Medicine}, pages = {1--13}, year = {2024}, publisher = {Nature Publishing Group US}, }