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Yuguang Yao

17 accepted papers

2026

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

ICML 2026poster

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining, and many of these …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Safety Mirage: How Spurious Correlations Undermine VLM Safety Fine-Tuning and Can Be Mitigated by Machine Unlearning

ICLR 2026poster

Recent vision language models (VLMs) have made remarkable strides in generative modeling with multimodal inputs, particularly text and images. However, their susceptibility to generating harmful content when exposed to unsafe queries raises critical safety concerns. While current alignment strategie…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Invariance Makes LLM Unlearning Resilient Even to Unanticipated Downstream Fine-Tuning

ICML 2025poster

Machine unlearning presents a promising approach to mitigating privacy and safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) by enabling the selective removal of targeted data or knowledge while preserving model utility. However, existing unlearning methods remain over-sensitive to downstream fine-tun…

2025

R2I-Bench: Benchmarking Reasoning-Driven Text-to-Image Generation

EMNLP 2025

Reasoning is a fundamental capability often required in real-world text-to-image (T2I) generation, e.g., generating “a bitten apple that has been left in the air for more than a week” necessitates understanding temporal decay and commonsense concepts. While recent T2I models have made impressive pro

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Backdoor Secrets Unveiled: Identifying Backdoor Data with Optimized Scaled Prediction Consistency

ICLR 2024poster

Modern machine learning (ML) systems demand substantial training data, often resorting to external sources. Nevertheless, this practice renders them vulnerable to backdoor poisoning attacks. Prior backdoor defense strategies have primarily focused on the identification of backdoored models or poison…

2024

Elevating Visual Prompting in Transfer Learning Via Pruned Model Ensembles: No Retrain, No Pain

ICASSP 2024accepted

Visual Prompting (VP) has been gaining traction in the deep learning community, yet its performance often falls short when compared to traditional finetuning methods in transfer learning. In this study, we present a novel approach to enhance VP by leveraging the insights from the lottery ticket hypo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

From Trojan Horses to Castle Walls: Unveiling Bilateral Data Poisoning Effects in Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

While state-of-the-art diffusion models (DMs) excel in image generation, concerns regarding their security persist. Earlier research highlighted DMs' vulnerability to data poisoning attacks, but these studies placed stricter requirements than conventional methods like 'BadNets' in image classificati…

2024

UnlearnCanvas: Stylized Image Dataset for Enhanced Machine Unlearning Evaluation in Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

The technological advancements in diffusion models (DMs) have demonstrated unprecedented capabilities in text-to-image generation and are widely used in diverse applications. However, they have also raised significant societal concerns, such as the generation of harmful content and copyright dispute…

2023

Model Sparsity Can Simplify Machine Unlearning

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

In response to recent data regulation requirements, machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical process to remove the influence of specific examples from a given model. Although exact unlearning can be achieved through complete model retraining using the remaining dataset, the associated compu…

2023

SMUG: Towards Robust Mri Reconstruction by Smoothed Unrolling

ICASSP 2023accepted

Although deep learning (DL) has gained much popularity for accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), recent studies have shown that DL-based MRI reconstruction models could be over-sensitive to tiny input perturbations (that are called ‘adversarial perturbations’), which cause unstable, low-qual…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

Understanding and Improving Visual Prompting: A Label-Mapping Perspective

CVPR 2023poster

We revisit and advance visual prompting (VP), an input prompting technique for vision tasks. VP can reprogram a fixed, pre-trained source model to accomplish downstream tasks in the target domain by simply incorporating universal prompts (in terms of input perturbation patterns) into downstream data…

2022

Advancing Model Pruning via Bi-level Optimization

NeurIPS 2022accept

The deployment constraints in practical applications necessitate the pruning of large-scale deep learning models, i.e., promoting their weight sparsity. As illustrated by the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH), pruning also has the potential of improving their generalization ability. At the core of LTH…

2022

How to Robustify Black-Box ML Models? A Zeroth-Order Optimization Perspective

ICLR 2022spotlight

The lack of adversarial robustness has been recognized as an important issue for state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) models, e.g., deep neural networks (DNNs). Thereby, robustifying ML models against adversarial attacks is now a major focus of research. However, nearly all existing defense method…

2022

Learning to Generate Image Source-Agnostic Universal Adversarial Perturbations

IJCAI 2022poster

Adversarial perturbations are critical for certifying the robustness of deep learning models. A ``universal adversarial perturbation'' (UAP) can simultaneously attack multiple images, and thus offers a more unified threat model, obviating an image-wise attack algorithm. However, the existing UAP gen…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2022

Reverse Engineering of Imperceptible Adversarial Image Perturbations

ICLR 2022poster

It has been well recognized that neural network based image classifiers are easily fooled by images with tiny perturbations crafted by an adversary. There has been a vast volume of research to generate and defend such adversarial attacks. However, the following problem is left unexplored: How to rev…

2022

When Does Backdoor Attack Succeed in Image Reconstruction? A Study of Heuristics vs. Bi-Level Solution

ICASSP 2022accepted

Recent studies have demonstrated the lack of robustness of image reconstruction networks to test-time evasion attacks, posing security risks and potential for misdiagnoses. In this paper, we evaluate how vulnerable such networks are to training-time poisoning attacks for the first time. In contrast…

Cited by 0SourceScholar