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Leo Yu Zhang

35 accepted papers

2026

Debiased Dual-Invariant Defense for Adversarially Robust Person Re-Identification

AAAI 2026technical

Person re-identification (ReID) is a fundamental task in many real-world applications such as pedestrian trajectory tracking. However, advanced deep learning-based ReID models are highly susceptible to adversarial attacks, where imperceptible perturbations to pedestrian images can cause entirely inc

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

Dual-View Inference Attack: Machine Unlearning Amplifies Privacy Exposure

AAAI 2026technical

Machine unlearning is a newly popularized technique for removing specific training data from a trained model, enabling it to comply with data deletion requests. While it protects the rights of users requesting unlearning, it also introduces new privacy risks. Prior works have primarily focused on th

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

GRASP: Hard-Label Black-Box Malware Evasion with Higher Success, Fewer Queries, and Smaller Perturbations

IJCAI 2026

Machine learning (ML)-based malware detectors are widely deployed but remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks. However, under hard-label black-box access, existing adversarial attacks on Windows Portable Executable (PE) malware are often query-inefficient and incur large file-size inflation. A comm

Cited by 0Scholar
2026

IdentityMask: A Robust Face-Centric Privacy Protection Against Unauthorized Personalization of Diffusion Models

IJCAI 2026

Unauthorized personalization based on diffusion models pose a severe and growing threat to digital privacy by enabling the unauthorized replication and exploitation of individual identities. Existing disrupting-based defenses primarily add invisible perturbations arbitrarily across the entire image

Cited by 0Scholar
2026

Nasty Adversarial Training: A Probability Sparsity Perspective for Robustness Enhancement

ICLR 2026poster

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial examples poses significant challenges to their reliable deployment. Among existing empirical defenses, adversarial training and robust distillation have proven the most effective. In this paper, we identify a property originally associated wit…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Persistent Backdoor Attacks in Class-Incremental Learning via Structural Invariant Anchoring

ICML 2026poster

Continual Learning (CL) continually performs parameter updates, posing a significant challenge to backdoor persistence. In this paper, we reveal that the most advanced attack relies on an implicit assumption that task-critical neurons remain stable across task learning; however, it does not hold in …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Transferable Backdoor Attacks for Code Models via Sharpness-Aware Adversarial Perturbation

AAAI 2026technical

Code models are increasingly adopted in software development but remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks via poisoned training data. Existing backdoor attacks on code models face a fundamental trade-off between transferability and stealthiness. Static trigger-based attacks insert fixed dead code patte

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

UnlearnShield: Shielding Forgotten Privacy against Unlearning Inversion

ICASSP 2026poster

Machine unlearning is an emerging technique that aims to remove the influence of specific data from trained models, thereby enhancing privacy protection. However, recent research has uncovered critical privacy vulnerabilities, showing that adversaries can exploit unlearning inversion to reconstruct…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AdvEDM: Fine-grained Adversarial Attack against VLM-based Embodied Agents

NeurIPS 2025poster

Vision-Language Models (VLMs), with their strong reasoning and planning capabilities, are widely used in embodied decision-making (EDM) tasks in embodied agents, such as autonomous driving and robotic manipulation. Recent research has increasingly explored adversarial attacks on VLMs to reveal their…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BadRobot: Jailbreaking Embodied LLM Agents in the Physical World

ICLR 2025poster

Embodied AI represents systems where AI is integrated into physical entities. Multimodal Large Language Model (LLM), which exhibits powerful language understanding abilities, has been extensively employed in embodied AI by facilitating sophisticated task planning. However, a critical safety issue re…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

BiMark: Unbiased Multilayer Watermarking for Large Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have raised urgent concerns about LLM-generated text authenticity, prompting regulatory demands for reliable identification mechanisms. Although watermarking offers a promising solution, existing approaches struggle to simultaneously achieve three cri…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Detecting and Corrupting Convolution-based Unlearnable Examples

AAAI 2025technical

Convolution-based unlearnable examples (UEs) employ class-wise multiplicative convolutional noise to training samples, severely compromising model performance. This fire-new type of UEs have successfully countered all defense mechanisms against UEs. The failure of such defenses can be attributed to…

2025

Improving Generalization of Universal Adversarial Perturbation via Dynamic Maximin Optimization

AAAI 2025technical

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are susceptible to universal adversarial perturbations (UAPs). These perturbations are meticulously designed to fool the target model universally across all sample classes. Unlike instance-specific adversarial examples (AEs), generating UAPs is more complex because they m…

2025

MARS: A Malignity-Aware Backdoor Defense in Federated Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Federated Learning (FL) is a distributed paradigm aimed at protecting participant data privacy by exchanging model parameters to achieve high-quality model training. However, this distributed nature also makes FL highly vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Notably, the recently proposed state-of-the-art…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

MMGIA: Gradient Inversion Attack Against Multimodal Federated Learning via Intermodal Correlation

IJCAI 2025

Multimodal federated learning (MMFL) enables collaborative model training across multiple modalities, such as images and text, without requiring direct data sharing. However, the inherent correlations between modalities introduce new privacy vulnerabilities, making MMFL more susceptible to gradient

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

NumbOD: A Spatial-Frequency Fusion Attack Against Object Detectors

AAAI 2025technical

With the advancement of deep learning, object detectors (ODs) with various architectures have achieved significant success in complex scenarios like autonomous driving. Previous adversarial attacks against ODs have been focused on designing customized attacks targeting their specific structures (eg,…

2025

PB-UAP: Hybride Universal Adversarial Attack for Image Segmentation

ICASSP 2025accepted

With the rapid advancement of deep learning, the model robustness has become a significant research hotspot, i.e., adversarial attacks on deep neural networks. Existing works primarily focus on image classification tasks, aiming to alter the model’s predicted labels. Due to the output complexity and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Performance Guaranteed Poisoning Attacks in Federated Learning: A Sliding Mode Approach

IJCAI 2025

Manipulation of local training data and local updates, i.e., the poisoning attack, is the main threat arising from the collaborative nature of the federated learning (FL) paradigm. Most existing poisoning attacks aim to manipulate local data/models in a way that causes denial-of-service (DoS) issues

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Pre-training CLIP against Data Poisoning with Optimal Transport-based Matching and Alignment

EMNLP 2025

Recent studies have shown that Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are threatened by targeted data poisoning and backdoor attacks due to massive training image-caption pairs crawled from the Internet. Previous defense methods correct poisoned image-caption pairs by matching a new c

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Test-Time Backdoor Detection for Object Detection Models

CVPR 2025poster

Object detection models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where attackers poison a small subset of training samples by embedding a predefined trigger to manipulate prediction. Detecting poisoned samples (i.e., those containing triggers) at test time can prevent backdoor activation. However, unlike…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Vanish into Thin Air: Cross-prompt Universal Adversarial Attacks for SAM2

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Recent studies reveal the vulnerability of the image segmentation foundation model SAM to adversarial examples. Its successor, SAM2, has attracted significant attention due to its strong generalization capability in video segmentation. However, its robustness remains unexplored, and it is unclear wh…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Conditional Backdoor Attack via JPEG Compression

AAAI 2024technical

Deep neural network (DNN) models have been proven vulnerable to backdoor attacks. One trend of backdoor attacks is developing more invisible and dynamic triggers to make attacks stealthier. However, these invisible and dynamic triggers can be inadvertently mitigated by some widely used passive denoi…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

DarkFed: A Data-Free Backdoor Attack in Federated Learning

IJCAI 2024poster

Federated learning (FL) has been demonstrated to be susceptible to backdoor attacks. However, existing academic studies on FL backdoor attacks rely on a high proportion of real clients with main task-related data, which is impractical. In the context of real-world industrial scenarios, even the simp…

2024

DarkSAM: Fooling Segment Anything Model to Segment Nothing

NeurIPS 2024poster

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has recently gained much attention for its outstanding generalization to unseen data and tasks. Despite its promising prospect, the vulnerabilities of SAM, especially to universal adversarial perturbation (UAP) have not been thoroughly investigated yet. In this paper, we…

2024

Detector Collapse: Backdooring Object Detection to Catastrophic Overload or Blindness in the Physical World

IJCAI 2024poster

Object detection tasks, crucial in safety-critical systems like autonomous driving, focus on pinpointing object locations. These detectors are known to be susceptible to backdoor attacks. However, existing backdoor techniques have primarily been adapted from classification tasks, overlooking deeper…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

IBD-PSC: Input-level Backdoor Detection via Parameter-oriented Scaling Consistency

ICML 2024poster

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where adversaries can maliciously trigger model misclassifications by implanting a hidden backdoor during model training. This paper proposes a simple yet effective input-level backdoor detection (dubbed IBD-PSC) as a `firewall' to filt…

2024

MISA: Unveiling the Vulnerabilities in Split Federated Learning

ICASSP 2024accepted

Federated learning (FL) and split learning (SL) are prevailing distributed paradigms in recent years. They both enable shared global model training while keeping data localized on users’ devices. The former excels in parallel execution capabilities, while the latter enjoys low dependence on edge com…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Revisiting Gradient Pruning: A Dual Realization for Defending against Gradient Attacks

AAAI 2024technical

Collaborative learning (CL) is a distributed learning framework that aims to protect user privacy by allowing users to jointly train a model by sharing their gradient updates only. However, gradient inversion attacks (GIAs), which recover users' training data from shared gradients, impose severe pri…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Towards Model Extraction Attacks in GAN-Based Image Translation via Domain Shift Mitigation

AAAI 2024technical

Model extraction attacks (MEAs) enable an attacker to replicate the functionality of a victim deep neural network (DNN) model by only querying its API service remotely, posing a severe threat to the security and integrity of pay-per-query DNN-based services. Although the majority of current research…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Denial-of-Service or Fine-Grained Control: Towards Flexible Model Poisoning Attacks on Federated Learning

IJCAI 2023poster

Federated learning (FL) is vulnerable to poisoning attacks, where adversaries corrupt the global aggregation results and cause denial-of-service (DoS). Unlike recent model poisoning attacks that optimize the amplitude of malicious perturbations along certain prescribed directions to cause DoS, we pr…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar
2023

Downstream-agnostic Adversarial Examples

ICCV 2023poster

Self-supervised learning usually uses a large amount of unlabeled data to pre-train an encoder which can be used as a general-purpose feature extractor, such that downstream users only need to perform fine-tuning operations to enjoy the benefit of "big model". Despite this promising prospect, the se…

Cited by 30PDFcodeScholar
2023

PointCA: Evaluating the Robustness of 3D Point Cloud Completion Models against Adversarial Examples

AAAI 2023technical

Point cloud completion, as the upstream procedure of 3D recognition and segmentation, has become an essential part of many tasks such as navigation and scene understanding. While various point cloud completion models have demonstrated their powerful capabilities, their robustness against adversarial…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2023

Towards Self-Interpretable Graph-Level Anomaly Detection

NeurIPS 2023poster

Graph-level anomaly detection (GLAD) aims to identify graphs that exhibit notable dissimilarity compared to the majority in a collection. However, current works primarily focus on evaluating graph-level abnormality while failing to provide meaningful explanations for the predictions, which largely l…

2022

Protecting Facial Privacy: Generating Adversarial Identity Masks via Style-Robust Makeup Transfer

CVPR 2022poster

While deep face recognition (FR) systems have shown amazing performance in identification and verification, they also arouse privacy concerns for their excessive surveillance on users, especially for public face images widely spread on social networks. Recently, some studies adopt adversarial exampl…

Cited by 130PDFcodeScholar
2022

Shielding Federated Learning: Robust Aggregation with Adaptive Client Selection

IJCAI 2022poster

Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train an accurate global model while protecting clients' data privacy. However, FL is susceptible to Byzantine attacks from malicious participants. Although the problem has gained significant attention, existing defenses have severa…