I am a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award (2024), as well as research awards from Cisco (2022) and Amazon (2020). My work has received best paper awards at CCS’24 and CVPRW’20 and an honorable mention at NDSS’19.
I was named one of Baidu Scholar's Global Top 50 Chinese Rising Stars in AI + X (2022) and received the IEEE Chicago Section Distinguished Junior R&D Award (2025) and Dean's Excellence Awards in Research (2024) and Mentorship (2025). I was also included in Stanford University's World's Top 2% Scientists list (2024, 2025). I received the Bochuan Scholarship, the highest student honor at Dalian University of Technology.
09/2026: Two papers on Causal Representation Learning and Efficient and Quantization-Robust FM are accepted by NeurIPS 2026. Congrats to All!
07/2026: Our Layer Inflation Attack on Google’s SynthID-Text has been cataloged by AI Threat Atlas as a named Watermarking & Provenance Attack and independently discussed by academic institutions, AI research platforms, and technical media.
05/2026: I was selected as a Gold Reviewer for ICML 2026.
05/2026: I am elevated to the rank of ACM Senior Member.
04/2026: Three papers on Robust LRM Alignment, GNN Ownership Protection, and Efficient Evolutionary Attacks are accepted by ICML 2026. Congrats to All!
03/2026: I am honored to receive the Dean's Excellence in Mentorship Award from the College of Computing at Illinois Tech. I thank the College for recognizing it!
03/2026: I received the IEEE Chicago Section 2025 Distinguished Junior R&D Award, which is awarded annually to a single recipient. I sincerely thank the IEEE Chicago Section Awards Committee.
03/2026: I am appointed as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC).
12/2025: I am elevated to the rank of IEEE Senior Member.
09/2025: Our work on Certified Robustness with Universal Asymmetric Randomization is accepted by IEEE CSF 2026 (a prestigious venue for computer security foundation). Congrats!
09/2025: Our work on Anti-Causal Representation Learning is accepted by NeurIPS 2025. Congrats to Arman!
09/2025: Our work on Ensemble Conformal Prediction against Data Poisoning Attacks is accepted by IEEE SP 2026 (Cycle 1). Congrats to Yuxin!
08/2025: Our proposal on Building a Holistic System for Privately Sharing Naturalistic Driving Data is funded by the new
NSF PDaSP (Track 2) program. Very grateful to NSF and FHWA/DOT for the generous support!
07/2025: Congrats to Jiate for receiving the Student Travel Award for USENIX Security’25. Thanks for the generous support!
06/2025: Our work on Rectifying the Privacy and Efficacy Measurements for Machine Unlearning (RULI) is accepted by Usenix Security 2025. Congrats!
02/2025: Our work on Deterministic Certification of GNNs against Poisoning Attacks with Arbitrary Perturbations is accepted by CVPR 2025. Congrats to Jiate!
02/2025: Our work on Differentially Private Federated Learning is accepted by CODASPY 2025. Congrats!
01/2025: I am honored to receive the Dean's Excellence in Research Award from the College of Computing at Illinois Tech. I thank the College for recognizing it!
01/2025: Our work on Certified Robust GNNs against Arbitrary Perturbations is accepted by Usenix Security 2025. Congrats to Jiate!
01/2025: Our work on Provably Robust Explainable GNNs is accepted by ICLR 2025. Congrats to Jiate!
01/2025: Our AAAI’25 paper on Adaptive Federated Learning for Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosis is selected for an ORAL presentation. Congrats to All!
12/2024: Congrats to Ben for receiving the Student Scholarship for AAAI 2025. Thanks for the generous support!
12/2024: Our work on Information-Theoretic Robust and Privacy-Preserving Representations Learning is accepted by AAAI 2025. Congrats to Ben and Leily!
12/2024: Our work on Practicable Black-box Attacks on Link Prediction in Dynamic Graphs is accepted by AAAI 2025. Congrats to Jiate!
12/2024: Our work on Adaptive Federated Learning for Parkinson’s Disease Diagnosis is accepted by AAAI 2025. Congrats to All!
11/2024: I am organizing the 3-day Workshop on Harmonious Human-AI Ecosystems scheduled from Nov. 20 to Nov. 22 as part of the Fall 2024 IDEAL Special Program on Interpretability, Privacy, and Fairness.
10/2024: Our work on the Distributed Backdoor Attacks on FedGL and Certified Defenses recieved the CCS’24 Distinguished Paper Award. Congrats to all the co-authors!
09/2024: Our Provably Robust Watermark for FedGL is accepted by NeurIPS 2024. Congrats to Yuxin!
07/2024: Congrats to Leily for receiving the Student Travel Award for USENIX Security 2024. Thanks for the generous support!
07/2024: Our Optimization-based Atttack (breaking SOTA poisoning defenses to federated learning) is accepted by CIKM 2024. Congrats to Yuxin!
07/2024: Our Information Propagation-based Explanation Framework is accepted by CIKM 2024. Congrats to Ruo!
07/2024: Our Certified Defense for Distributed Backdoor Attack on Federated Graph Learning is accepted by CCS 2024. Congrats to Yuxin!
07/2024: Our Certified Black-Box Attack Framework (breaking SOTA defenses with provable confidence and limited resources) is accepted by CCS 2024. Congrats to Hanbin!
07/2024: Our Causal-Explainable GNN via Neural Causal Models is accepted by ECCV 2024. Congrats to Arman!
06/2024: Our IDEAL insititute is organizing the Annual Meeting on June 6th and Industry Day on June 7th. You are welcome to register for the event here for free.
06/2024: Our Knowledge Poisoning Attack on the Retrieval-Augmented Generation of LLMs is accepted by Usenix Security 2025. Congrats to All!
05/2024: Arman starts his research internship on Causal Explanation and Causal Representation Learning at Mayo Clinic in Summer 2024. Congrats!
05/2024: Leily starts her research internship on Data Analytics at CCC Intelligent Solutions in Summer 2024. Congrats!
05/2024: Our paper on Understanding the Robustness of GNN Explainers is accepted by ICML 2024. Congrats to Jiate!
04/2024: Jane receives the Best Presentation Award for Ph.D. Research at 2024 ECE Day - Student Research Competition. Congrats!
02/2024: Our Information-Theoretic Privacy-Preserving Representation Learning Framework against Inference Attacks is accepted by Usenix Security 2024 (Fall Cycle). Congrats to Leily and Ben!
02/2024: My proposal on Trustworthy Machine Learning Meets Information Theory recevies the NSF CAREER Award. Thank NSF for the generous support!
01/2024: Our Deterministic Certification of GNNs against Adversarial Perturbations is accepted for an ORAL presentation in ICLR 2024. Congrats to All!