← Search

Zhenting Wang

31 accepted papers

2026

A Single Layer to Explain Them All: Understanding Massive Values in Large Language Models

ICML 2026poster

We investigate the origins of massive activations in large language models (LLMs) and identify a specific layer named the Massive Emergence Layer (ME Layer), that is consistently observed across model families, where massive activations first emerge and subsequently propagate to deeper layers throug…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

MCP-Bench: Benchmarking Tool-Using LLM Agents with Complex Real-World Tasks via MCP Servers

ICLR 2026poster

We introduce MCP-Bench, a benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on realistic, multi-step tasks that demand tool use, cross-tool coordination, precise parameter control, and planning/reasoning for solving tasks. Built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP), MCP-Bench connects LLMs to 28…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

TokenSeek: Memory Efficient Fine Tuning via Instance-Aware Token Ditching

ICLR 2026poster

Fine tuning has been regarded as a de facto approach for adapting large language models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, but the high training memory consumption inherited from LLMs makes this process inefficient. Among existing memory efficient approaches, activation-related optimization has proven part…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ADO: Automatic Data Optimization for Inputs in LLM Prompts

ACL 2025finding

This study explores a novel approach to enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) through the optimization of input data within prompts. While previous research has primarily focused on refining instruction components and augmenting input data with in-context examples, our work investi…

2025

Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models by Searching Optimal Vision Token Reduction

CVPR 2025poster

Prevailing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) encode the input image(s) as vision tokens and feed them into the language backbone, similar to how Large Language Models (LLMs) process the text tokens. However, the number of vision tokens increases quadratically as the image resolutions, leading…

2025

Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents

ICLR 2025poster

Although LLM-based agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), can use external tools and memory mechanisms to solve complex real-world tasks, they may also introduce critical security vulnerabilities. However, the existing literature does not comprehensively evaluate attacks and defenses again…

2025

An Optimizable Suffix Is Worth A Thousand Templates: Efficient Black-box Jailbreaking without Affirmative Phrases via LLM as Optimizer

NAACL 2025findings

Despite prior safety alignment efforts, LLMs can still generate harmful and unethical content when subjected to jailbreaking attacks. Existing jailbreaking methods fall into two main categories: template-based and optimization-based methods. The former requires significant manual effort and domain k…

2025

CO-SPY: Combining Semantic and Pixel Features to Detect Synthetic Images by AI

CVPR 2025poster

With the rapid advancement of generative AI, it is now possible to synthesize high-quality images in a few seconds. Despite the power of these technologies, they raise significant concerns regarding misuse. Current efforts to distinguish between real and AI-generated images may lack generalization,…

2025

Continuous Concepts Removal in Text-to-image Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Text-to-image diffusion models have shown an impressive ability to generate high-quality images from input textual descriptions/prompts. However, concerns have been raised about the potential for these models to create content that infringes on copyrights or depicts disturbing subject matter. Removi…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Data-centric NLP Backdoor Defense from the Lens of Memorization

NAACL 2025findings

Backdoor attack is a severe threat to the trustworthiness of DNN-based language models. In this paper, we first extend the definition of memorization of language models from sample-wise to more fine-grained sentence element-wise (e.g., word, phrase, structure, and style), and then point out that lan…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

EmojiPrompt: Generative Prompt Obfuscation for Privacy-Preserving Communication with Cloud-based LLMs

NAACL 2025long

Cloud-based Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT have become increasingly integral to daily operations. Nevertheless, they also introduce privacy concerns: firstly, numerous studies underscore the risks to user privacy posed by jailbreaking cloud-based LLMs; secondly, the LLM service provide…

2025

Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge and Concept at Different Layers?

COLING 2025main

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks. However, the mechanisms by which these models encode tasks of varying complexities remain poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the hypothesis that LLMs process concepts of varying complexities in di…

2025

How to Evaluate and Mitigate IP Infringement in Visual Generative AI?

ICML 2025poster

The popularity of visual generative AI models like DALL-E 3, Stable Diffusion XL, Stable Video Diffusion, and Sora has been increasing. Through extensive evaluation, we discovered that the state-of-the-art visual generative models can generate content that bears a striking resemblance to characters…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Invisible Backdoor Attack against Self-supervised Learning

CVPR 2025poster

Self-supervised learning (SSL) models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks that are effective in SSL often involve noticeable triggers, like colored patches or visible noise, which are vulnerable to human inspection. This paper proposes an imperceptible and effective backdoo…

2025

LoR-VP: Low-Rank Visual Prompting for Efficient Vision Model Adaptation

ICLR 2025poster

Visual prompting has gained popularity as a method for adapting pre-trained models to specific tasks, particularly in the realm of parameter-efficient tuning. However, existing visual prompting techniques often pad the prompt parameters around the image, limiting the interaction between the visual p…

2025

MLLM-as-a-Judge for Image Safety without Human Labeling

CVPR 2025highlight

Image content safety has become a significant challenge with the rise of visual media on online platforms. Meanwhile, in the age of AI-generated content (AIGC), many image generation models are capable of producing harmful content, such as images containing sexual or violent material. Thus, it becom…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

ProSec: Fortifying Code LLMs with Proactive Security Alignment

ICML 2025poster

While recent code-specific large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced their code generation capabilities, the safety of these models remains under-explored, posing potential risks as insecure code generated by these models may introduce vulnerabilities into real-world systems. Existing metho…

2025

The Hidden Life of Tokens: Reducing Hallucination of Large Vision-Language Models Via Visual Information Steering

ICML 2025poster

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can reason effectively over both textual and visual inputs, but they tend to hallucinate syntactically coherent yet visually ungrounded contents. In this paper, we investigate the internal dynamics of hallucination by examining the tokens logits rankings througho…

2025

Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning

ACL 2025finding

Reasoning is critical for large language models (LLMs) to excel in a wide range of tasks. While methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and enhance LLM performance by decomposing problems into intermediate steps, they also incur significant overhead in token usage, leading to increased costs.…

2025

Visual Agents as Fast and Slow Thinkers

ICLR 2025poster

Achieving human-level intelligence requires refining cognitive distinctions between \textit{System 1} and \textit{System 2} thinking. While contemporary AI, driven by large language models, demonstrates human-like traits, it falls short of genuine cognition. Transitioning from structured benchmarks…

2024

DIAGNOSIS: Detecting Unauthorized Data Usages in Text-to-image Diffusion Models

ICLR 2024poster

Recent text-to-image diffusion models have shown surprising performance in generating high-quality images. However, concerns have arisen regarding the unauthorized data usage during the training or fine-tuning process. One example is when a model trainer collects a set of images created by a particu…

2024

Finding a needle in a haystack: A Black-Box Approach to Invisible Watermark Detection

ECCV 2024poster

"In this paper, we propose WaterMark Detector (), the first invisible watermark detection method under a black-box and annotation-free setting. is capable of detecting arbitrary watermarks within a given detection dataset using a clean non-watermarked dataset as a reference, without relying on speci…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

How to Trace Latent Generative Model Generated Images without Artificial Watermark?

ICML 2024poster

Latent generative models (e.g., Stable Diffusion) have become more and more popular, but concerns have arisen regarding potential misuse related to images generated by these models. It is, therefore, necessary to analyze the origin of images by inferring if a particular image was generated by a spec…

2023

NOTABLE: Transferable Backdoor Attacks Against Prompt-based NLP Models

ACL 2023long

Prompt-based learning is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attacks against prompt-based models consider injecting backdoors into the entire embedding layers or word embedding vectors. Such attacks can be easily affected by retraining on downstream tasks and with different prompting s…

2023

Where Did I Come From? Origin Attribution of AI-Generated Images

NeurIPS 2023poster

Image generation techniques have been gaining increasing attention recently, but concerns have been raised about the potential misuse and intellectual property (IP) infringement associated with image generation models. It is, therefore, necessary to analyze the origin of images by inferring if a spe…

2022

BppAttack: Stealthy and Efficient Trojan Attacks Against Deep Neural Networks via Image Quantization and Contrastive Adversarial Learning

CVPR 2022poster

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to Trojan attacks. Existing attacks use visible patterns (e.g., a patch or image transformations) as triggers, which are vulnerable to human inspection. In this paper, we propose stealthy and efficient Trojan attacks, BppAttack. Based on existing biology literatur…

Cited by 120PDFcodeScholar
2022

Complex Backdoor Detection by Symmetric Feature Differencing

CVPR 2022poster

Many existing backdoor scanners work by finding a small and fixed trigger. However, advanced attacks have large and pervasive triggers, rendering existing scanners less effective. We develop a new detection method. It first uses a trigger inversion technique to generate triggers, namely, universal i…

Cited by 64PDFcodeScholar
2022

Rethinking the Reverse-engineering of Trojan Triggers

NeurIPS 2022accept

Deep Neural Networks are vulnerable to Trojan (or backdoor) attacks. Reverse-engineering methods can reconstruct the trigger and thus identify affected models. Existing reverse-engineering methods only consider input space constraints, e.g., trigger size in the input space. Expressly, they assume th…

2022

Training with More Confidence: Mitigating Injected and Natural Backdoors During Training

NeurIPS 2022accept

The backdoor or Trojan attack is a severe threat to deep neural networks (DNNs). Researchers find that DNNs trained on benign data and settings can also learn backdoor behaviors, which is known as the natural backdoor. Existing works on anti-backdoor learning are based on weak observations that the…

2021

Assembly Planning by Recognizing a Graphical Instruction Manual

IROS 2021poster

This paper proposes a robot assembly planning method by automatically reading the graphical instruction manuals designed for humans. Essentially, the method generates an Assembly Task Sequence Graph (ATSG) by recognizing a graphical instruction manual. An ATSG is a graph describing the assembly task…

Cited by 13SourceScholar