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Zhenhong Zhou

17 accepted papers

2026

DiffuGuard: How Intrinsic Safety is Lost and Found in Diffusion Large Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

The rapid advancement of Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) introduces unprecedented vulnerabilities that are fundamentally distinct from Autoregressive LLMs, stemming from their iterative and parallel generation mechanisms. In this paper, we conduct an in-depth analysis of dLLM vulnerabilities…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Goal-Aware Identification and Rectification of Misinformation in Multi-Agent Systems

ICLR 2026poster

Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) have demonstrated strong advantages in addressing complex real-world tasks. However, due to the introduction of additional attack surfaces, MASs are particularly vulnerable to misinformation injection. To facilitate a deeper understanding of misi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Hidden in the Noise: Unveiling Backdoors in Audio LLMs Alignment Through Latent Acoustic Pattern Triggers

AAAI 2026technical

As Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) emerge as powerful tools for speech processing, their safety implications demand urgent attention. While considerable research has explored textual and vision safety, audio’s distinct characteristics present significant challenges. This paper first investigates

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

LARFT: Closing the Cognition-Action Gap for Length Instruction Following in Large Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Despite the strong performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex instruction-following tasks, precise control of output length remains a persistent challenge. Existing methods primarily attempt to enforce length constraints by externally imposing length signals or optimization objectives, w…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Memoria-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Memory in Long-Horizon Autonomous Agents

ICML 2026poster

Memory is a core capability of autonomous agents, yet existing benchmarks evaluate it primarily in constrained settings such as short dialogues or synthetic tasks, failing to reflect realistic agent deployments. We present \textbf{Memoria-Bench}, a benchmark for evaluating agent memory grounded in c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SafeSeek: Universal Attribution of Safety Circuits in Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Mechanistic interpretability reveals that safety-critical behaviors (e.g., alignment, jailbreak, backdoor) in Large Language Models (LLMs) are grounded in specialized functional components. However, existing safety attribution methods struggle with generalization and reliability due to their relianc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Uncovering Hidden Triggers: Backdoor Attribution in Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks through data poisoning, yet the internal mechanisms governing these attacks remain a black box. Previous research on interpretability for LLM safety tends to focus on alignment, jailbreak, and hallucination, but overlooks bac…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Crabs: Consuming Resource via Auto-generation for LLM-DoS Attack under Black-box Settings

ACL 2025finding

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks yet still are vulnerable to external threats, particularly LLM Denial-of-Service (LLM-DoS) attacks. Specifically, LLM-DoS attacks aim to exhaust computational resources and block services. However, existing st…

2025

DemonAgent: Dynamically Encrypted Multi-Backdoor Implantation Attack on LLM-based Agent

EMNLP 2025

As LLM-based agents become increasingly prevalent, triggers implanted in user queries or environment feedback can activate hidden backdoors, raising critical concerns about safety vulnerabilities in agents.However, traditional backdoor attacks are often detectable by safety audits that analyze the r

2025

LIFEBENCH: Evaluating Length Instruction Following in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

While large language models (LLMs) can solve PhD-level reasoning problems over long context inputs, they still struggle with a seemingly simpler task: *following explicit length instructions*—e.g., *write a 10,000-word novel*. Additionally, models often generate far too short outputs, terminate prem…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

On the Role of Attention Heads in Large Language Model Safety

ICLR 2025oral

Large language models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple language tasks, yet their safety guardrails can be circumvented, leading to harmful generations. In light of this, recent research on safety mechanisms has emerged, revealing that when safety representations or component a…

2025

PD3F: A Pluggable and Dynamic DoS-Defense Framework against resource consumption attacks targeting Large Language Models

EMNLP 2025

Large Language Models (LLMs), due to substantial computational requirements, are vulnerable to resource consumption attacks, which can severely degrade server performance or even cause crashes, as demonstrated by denial-of-service (DoS) attacks designed for LLMs. However, existing works lack mitigat

2025

Reinforced Lifelong Editing for Language Models

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) acquire information from pre-training corpora, but their stored knowledge can become inaccurate or outdated over time. Model editing addresses this challenge by modifying model parameters without retraining, and prevalent approaches leverage hypernetworks to generate the…

2024

Alignment-Enhanced Decoding: Defending Jailbreaks via Token-Level Adaptive Refining of Probability Distributions

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models are susceptible to jailbreak attacks, which can result in the generation of harmful content. While prior defenses mitigate these risks by perturbing or inspecting inputs, they ignore competing objectives, the underlying cause of alignment failures. In this paper, we propose Ali…

2024

Course-Correction: Safety Alignment Using Synthetic Preferences

EMNLP 2024industry

The risk of harmful contents generated by large language models (LLMs) becomes a critical concern. This paper systematically evaluates and enhances LLMs’ capability to perform course-correction, , the model can steer away from generating harmful content autonomously. First, we introduce the C2-Eval…

2024

How Alignment and Jailbreak Work: Explain LLM Safety through Intermediate Hidden States

EMNLP 2024finding

Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid responding to malicious user inputs. Unfortunately, jailbreak can circumvent safety guardrails, resulting in LLMs generating harmful content and raising concerns about LLM safety. Due to language models with intensive parameters often re…

2024

Quantifying and Analyzing Entity-Level Memorization in Large Language Models

AAAI 2024technical

Large language models (LLMs) have been proven capable of memorizing their training data, which can be extracted through specifically designed prompts. As the scale of datasets continues to grow, privacy risks arising from memorization have attracted increasing attention. Quantifying language model m…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar