Jian Lou
Assistant Professor
Email: jian.lou@hoiying.net (Primary) or louj5@mail.sysu.edu.cn
Official webpage at SYSU: [Link]
Updated: August 2025
Assistant Professor
Email: jian.lou@hoiying.net (Primary) or louj5@mail.sysu.edu.cn
Official webpage at SYSU: [Link]
Updated: August 2025
I am now an assistant professor at Sun Yat-sen University, with a lot of help from my former advisor, labmates, and friends. I was a Postdoc fortunately and gratefully hosted by Prof. Li Xiong at Emory University from 2019 to 2021.
I work on privacy-preserving machine learning and data analytics. I have a PhD in Computer Science and a BSc in Mathematics.
I am looking for Undergraduate Research Interns and Postdoctoral Fellows. If you are interested, please send me your CV at jian.lou@hoiying.net.
August 2025: I will serve as an Area Chair for ICLR 2026.
August 2025: One paper is accepted to ACM CCS 2025.
July 2025: Our paper won a best paper award at ACISP 2025!
July 2025: I will serve as a PC member for ACM CCS 2026.
July 2025: I will serve as a Senior PC member for AAAI 2026.
June 2025: One paper is accepted to USENIX Sec.
May 2025: Three papers are accepted to ICML 2025.
May 2025: One paper is accepted to IJCAI 2025.
November 2024: I will serve as an Area Chair for ICML 2025.
October 2024: I will serve as a PC member for ACM CCS 2025.
October 2024: Our paper won a distinguished paper award at ACM CCS 2024!
August 2024: One paper is accepted to IEEE TDSC.
August 2024: I will serve as a Senior PC member for AAAI 2025.
* denotes student collaborator.
2025
[ACISP] Xiaoyu Zhang, Yong Lin, Meixia Miao, Jian Lou, Jin Li, Xiaofeng Chen, “Zeroth-Order Federated Private Tuning for Pretrained Large Language Models", ACISP'25 (Best Paper Award).
[ACM CCS] with Chenyang Zhang*, Xiaoyu Zhang, Kai Wu, “PreferCare: Preference Dataset Copyright Protection in LLM Alignment by Watermark Injection and Verification", ACM CCS'25.
[USENIX Sec] with Jiawen Zhang*, Kejia Chen*, Lipeng He, Dan Li, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song, Jian Liu, Kui Ren, Xiaohu Yang, “Activation Approximations Can Incur Safety Vulnerabilities in Aligned LLMs: Comprehensive Analysis and Defense", USENIX Sec'25.[arXiv]
[ICML] with Chenyang Zhang*, Xiaoyu Zhang, Kai Wu, Zilong Wang, Xiaofeng Chen, “PoisonedEye: Knowledge Poisoning Attack on Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Large Vision-Language Models", ICML'25.[Link]
[ICML] with Kejia Chen*, Jiawen Zhang*, Jiacong Hu, Yu Wang, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song, “Assessing Safety Risks and Quantization-aware Safety Patching for Quantized Large Language Models", ICML'25.[Link]
[ICML] Yuecheng Li, Lele Fu, Tong Wang, Jian Lou, Bin Chen, Lei Yang, Jian Shen, Zibin Zheng, Chuan Chen, “Clients Collaborate: Flexible Differentially Private Federated Learning with Guaranteed Improvement of Utility-Privacy Trade-off", ICML'25.[arXiv]
[IJCAI] Hong kyu Lee, Qiuchen Zhang, Carl Yang, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, “Contrastive Unlearning: A Contrastive Approach to Machine Unlearning", IJCAI'25.[arXiv]
[CIKM] Zhuomin Chen*, Dan Li, Jiahui Zhou*, Shunyu Wu*, Haozhen Ye*, Jian Lou, See-Kiong Ng, “Integrating Time Series into LLMs via Multi-layer Steerable Embedding Fusion for Enhanced Forecasting", CIKM'25.
[ACL] Yukai Zhou, Jian Lou, Zhijie Huang, Zhan Qin, Sibei Yang, Wenjie Wang, “Don't Say No: Jailbreaking LLM by Suppressing Refusal", ACL Findings'25.[arXiv]
[EMNLP] Fenghua Weng, Jian Lou, Jun Feng, Minlie Huang, Wenjie Wang, “Adversary-Aware DPO: Enhancing Safety Alignment in Vision Language Models via Adversarial Training", EMNLP Findings'25.[arXiv]
[AMIA] Yifei Ren, Linghui Zeng, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, Joyce Ho, Xiaoqian Jiang, Sivasubramanium Bhavani, “Unraveling Complex Temporal Patterns in EHRs via Robust Irregular Tensor Factorization", AMIA Informatics Summit'25.
[TKDE] Zhigang Wang, Yizhen Yu, Mingxin Li, Jian Lou, Ning Wang, Yu Gu, Shen Su, Yuan Liu, Hui Jiang, Zhihong Tian, “FELEMN: Toward Efficient Feature-Level Machine Unlearning for Exact Privacy Protection", IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 2025.
[TDSC] Qiao Xue, Qingqing Ye, Haibo Hu, Jian Lou, Jin Li, Chengfang Fang, Jie Shi, “LabelDP Leaks Privacy – A Tightened Correlation-aware Privacy Model for Labeled Training Data", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2025.
[TMM] Xiaoyu Zhang, Yulin Jin, Haoyu Tong, Jian Lou, Kai Wu, Xiaofeng Chen, “Purifier+ : Plug-and-play Backdoor Mitigation for Pre-trained Models via Activation Alignment", IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 2025.
Congcong Fu*, Hui Li, Jian Lou, Jiangtao Cui, “Towards Answering Analytical Query over Hierarchical Histogram under Untrusted Servers", Distributed Parallel Databases, 2025.
2024
[ACM CCS] Junxu Liu, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, Jinfei Liu, Xiaofeng Meng, “Cross-silo Federated Learning with Record-level Personalized Differential Privacy", ACM CCS'24 (Distinguished Paper Award).
[ACM CCS] with Yuke Hu*, Jiaqi Liu*, Wangze Ni, Feng Lin, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren, “ERASER: Machine Unlearning in MLaaS via an Inference Serving-Aware Approach", ACM CCS'24.
[S&P] with Hongwei Yao*, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren, “PromptCARE: Prompt Copyright Protection by Watermark Injection and Verification", S&P/Oakland'24.
[TDSC] with Xiaoyu Zhang, Chenyang Zhang*, Kai Wu, Zilong Wang, Xiaofeng Chen, “DuplexGuard: Safeguarding Deletion Right in Machine Unlearning via Duplex Watermarking", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2024.
[AAAI] with Wenjie Wang, Pengfei Tang, Yuanming Shao, Lance Waller, Yi-an Ko, Li Xiong, “IGAMT: Privacy Preserved Electronic Health Record Synthetic Approach with Heterogeneity and Irregularity", AAAI'24.
[ECAI] with Jiawen Zhang*, Kejia Chen*, Zunlei Feng, Mingli Song, “SecPE: Secure Prompt Ensembling for Private and Robust Large Language Models", ECAI'24.
[NeurIPS] Kai Wu, Yujian Li, Jian Lou, Xiaoyu Zhang, Handing Wang, Jing Liu, “Rapid Plug-in Defenders", NeurIPS'24.
[SIGMOD] Congcong Fu*, Hui Li, Jian Lou, Huizhen Li, Jiangtao Cui, “DP-starJ: A Differentially Private Scheme towards Analytical Star-Join Queries", SIGMOD'24.
[SIGMOD] Xiaochen Li, Weiran Liu, Jian Lou, Yuan Hong, Lei Zhang, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren, “Local Differentially Private Heavy Hitter Detection in Data Streams with Bounded Memory", SIGMOD'24.
[CVPR] Wen Yin, Jian Lou, Pan Zhou, Yulai Xie, Dan Feng, Yuhua Sun, Tailai Zhang, Lichao Sun, “Temperature-based Backdoor Attacks on Thermal Infrared Object Detection", CVPR'24.
[WWW] Qiuchen Zhang, Hong kyu Lee, Jing Ma, Jian Lou, Carl Yang, Li Xiong, “DPAR: Decoupled Graph Neural Networks with Node-Level Differential Privacy", WWW'24.
[AAAI] Lanlan Chen, Kai Wu, Jian Lou, Jing Liu, “Signed Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equation for Modeling Continuous-time Dynamics", AAAI'24.
[ACM MM] Haoyu Tong*, Xiaoyu Zhang, Yulin Jin*, Jian Lou, Kai Wu, Xiaofeng Chen, “Balancing Generalization and Robustness in Adversarial Training via Steering through Clean and Adversarial Gradient Directions", ACM MM'24.
[DBSec] Fereshteh Razmi, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, “Does Differential Privacy Prevent Backdoor Attacks in Practice?", DBSec'24.
[ICASSP] Hongwei Yao*, Jian Lou, Zhan Qin, “PoisonPrompt: Backdoor Attack on Prompt-based Large Language Models", ICASSP'24.
[TDSC] Yuchen Yang*, Bo Yuan*, Jian Lou, Zhan Qin, “SCRR: Stable Malware Detection under Unknown Deployment Environment Shift by Decoupled Spurious Correlations Filtering", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2024.
[TDSC] Yuke Hu*, Yang Wang, Jian Lou, Wei Liang, Ruofan Wu, Weiqiang Wang, Xiaochen Li, Jinfei Liu, Zhan Qin, “Privacy Risks of Federated Knowledge Graph Embedding: New Membership Inference Attacks and Personalized Differential Privacy Defense", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2024.
Chenyang Chen, Xiaoyu Zhang, Hongyi Qiu, Jian Lou, Zhengyang Liu, Xiaofeng Chen, “MaskArmor: Confidence Masking-based Defense Mechanism for GNN against MIA", Information Science, 2024.
2023
[ACM CCS] Yiling He*, Jian Lou, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren, “FINER: Enhancing State-of-the-art Classifiers with Feature Attribution to Facilitate Risk Analysis", ACM CCS'23.
[NeurIPS] with Jiaqi Liu*, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren, “Certified Minimax Unlearning with Generalization Rates and Deletion Capacity", NeurIPS'23.
[ICCV] with Junxu Liu*, Mingsheng Xue*, Xiaoyu Zhang, Li Xiong, Zhan Qin, “MUter: Machine Unlearning on Adversarial Training Models", ICCV'23.
[ACM MM] with Yulin Jin*, Xiaoyu Zhang, Xiaofeng Chen, “ACQ: Few-shot Backdoor Defense via Activation Clipping and Quantizing", ACM MM'23.
[CIKM] with Shuijing Zhang*, Li Xiong, Xiaoyu Zhang, Jing Liu, “Closed-form Machine Unlearning for Matrix Factorization", CIKM'23.
[NeurIPS] Jinfei Liu, Pengyun Zhu, Long Wen, Feng Xue, Jian Lou, et al., “CAPP-130 : A Dataset of Chinese Application Privacy Policy Summarization and Interpretations", NeurIPS'23 Datasets and Benchmarks Track.
[VLDB] Haocheng Xia, Jinfei Liu, Jian Lou, Zhan Qin, Kui Ren, Yang Cao, Li Xiong, “Equitable Data Valuation Meets the Right to be Forgotten in Model Markets", VLDB'23.
[ICCV] Yulin Jin*, Xiaoyu Zhang, Jian Lou, Xu Ma, Xiaofeng Chen, Zilong Wang, “Explaining Adversarial Robustness of Neural Networks from Clustering Effect Perspective", ICCV'23.
[CIKM] Junxu Liu, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, Xiaofeng Meng, “Personalized Differentially Private Federated Learning without Exposing Privacy Budgets", CIKM'23.
[ECML-PKDD] Fereshteh Razmi, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, Yuan Hong, “Interpretation Attacks on Interpretable Models with Electronic Health Records", ECML-PKDD'23.
[ML4H] Yifei Ren*, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, Joyce Ho, Xiaoqian Jiang, Sivasubramanium Bhavani, “MULTIPAR: Supervised Irregular Tensor Factorization with Multi-task Learning", ML4H'23.
[TDSC] Hongwei Yao*, Zheng Li, Kunzhe Huang, Jian Lou, et al., “RemovalNet: DNN Fingerprint Removal Attacks", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2023.
2022
[ACM MM] with Xiaoyu Zhang, Yulin Jin*, Tao Wang, Xiaofeng Chen, “Purifier: Plug-and-play Backdoor Mitigation for Pre-trained Models Via Anomaly Activation Suppression", ACM MM'22.
[ACM MM] Yuhua Sun, Tailai Zhang, Xingjun Ma, Pan Zhou, Jian Lou, Zichuan Xu, Xing Di, Yu Cheng, Lichao Sun, “Backdoor Attacks on Crowd Counting", ACM MM'22.
[VLDB] Junxu Liu*, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, Jinfei Liu, Xiaofeng Meng, “Projected Federated Averaging with Heterogeneous Differential Privacy", VLDB'22.
[ICDM] Kaixin Yuan*, Jing Liu, Jian Lou, “Higher-Order Masked Graph Neural Networks for Traffic Flow Prediction", ICDM'22.
[CIKM] Farnaz Tahmasebian*, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, “RobustFed: A Truth Inference Approach for Robust Federated Learning", CIKM'22.
[CIKM] Congcong Fu*, Hui Li, Jian Lou, Jiangtao Cui, “DP-HORUS: Differentially Private Hierarchical Count Histograms under Untrusted Server", CIKM'22.
[TDSC] Pengfei Tang*, Wenjie Wang*, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, “Generating Adversarial Examples with Distance Constrained Adversarial Imitation Networks", IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2022.
2021
[ICCV] with Haowen Lin*, Li Xiong, Cyrus Shahabi, “Integer-arithmetic-only Certified Robustness for Quantized Neural Networks", ICCV'21.
[WWW] with Jing Ma*, Qiuchen Zhang*, Li Xiong, Joyce Ho, “Communication Efficient Federated Generalized Tensor Factorization for Collaborative Health Data Analytics", WWW'21.
[IJCAI] with Qiuchen Zhang*, Jing Ma*, Li Xiong, “Private Stochastic Non-convex Optimization with Improved Utility Rates", IJCAI'21.
[NAACL] with Wenjie Wang*, Pengfei Tang*, Li Xiong, “Certified Robustness to Word Substitution Attack with Differential Privacy", NAACL'21.
[TNNLS] with Yiu-ming Cheung, “An Uplink Communication Efficient Approach to Feature-wise Distributed Sparse Optimization with Differential Privacy”, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems, 2021.
[VLDB] Jinfei Liu, Jian Lou, Junxu Liu, Li Xiong, Jian Pei, Jimeng Sun, “Dealer: An End-to-End Model Marketplace with Differential Privacy", VLDB'21.
[VLDB] Jinfei Liu, Qiongqiong Lin, Jiayao Zhang, et al., “Demonstration of Dealer: An End-to-End Model Marketplace with Differential Privacy", VLDB'21 Demo Track.
[ICDM] Jing Ma*, Qiuchen Zhang*, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, Joyce Ho, Sivasubramanium Bhavani, “Communication Efficient Tensor Factorization for Decentralized Healthcare Networks", ICDM'21.
[CIKM] Jing Ma*, Qiuchen Zhang*, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, Joyce Ho, “Temporal Network Embedding via Tensor Factorization", CIKM'21.
[WISE] Yiu-ming Cheung, Jian Lou, Feng Yu, “Vertical Federated Principal Component Analysis on Feature-wise Distributed Data", WISE'21.
[TCYB] Qiquan Shi, Yiu-ming Cheung, Jian Lou, “Robust Tensor SVD and Recovery with Rank Estimation", IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, 2021.
2020
[WI-IAT] with Yiu-ming Cheung, “Projection-free Online Empirical Risk Minimization with Privacy-preserving and Privacy Expiration", WI-IAT'20 (Best in Theoretical Paper Award).
[CIKM] with Yifei Ren*, Li Xiong, Joyce Ho, “Robust Irregular Tensor Factorization and Completion for Temporal Health Data Analysis", CIKM'20.
[TIP] with Yiu-ming Cheung, “Robust Low-rank Tensor Minimization via a New Tensor Spectral k-Support Norm”, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 2020.
[Bigdata] Qiuchen Zhang*, Jing Ma*, Yonghui Xiao, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, “Broadening Differential Privacy for Deep Learning Against Model Inversion Attacks", Bigdata'20.
[Bigdata] Qiuchen Zhang*, Jing Ma*, Jian Lou, Li Xiong, Xiaoqian Jiang, “Towards Training Robust Private Aggregation of Teacher Ensembles Under Noisy Labels", Bigdata'20.
[TIFS] Meng Pang, Yiu-ming Cheung, Binghui Wang, Jian Lou, “Synergistic Generic Learning for Face Recognition From a Contaminated Single Sample per Person", IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2020.
2019 and before
[CIKM] Jing Ma*, Qiuchen Zhang*, Jian Lou, Joyce Ho, Li Xiong, Xiaoqian Jiang, "Privacy-Preserving Tensor Factorization for Collaborative Health Data Analysis", CIKM'19.
[MICCAI] with Wenwen Li, Shuo Zhou, Haiping Lu, “Sturm: Sparse Tubal-Regularized Multilinear Regression for fMRI", MLMI@MICCAI'19.
[AAAI] with Yiu-ming Cheung, "Uplink Communication Efficient Differentially Private Sparse Optimization With Feature-Wise Distributed Data", AAAI'18.
[TCSVT] Meng Pang, Yiu-ming Cheung, Risheng Liu, Jian Lou, and Chuang Lin, “Toward efficient image representation: Sparse concept discriminant matrix factorization", IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 2018.
[ML] with Yiu-ming Cheung, “Proximal Average Approximated Incremental Gradient Descent for Composite Penalty Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization”, Machine Learning, 2017.
[CIKM] with Yiu-ming Cheung, “Scalable Spectral k-Support Norm Regularization for Robust Low Rank Subspace Learning", CIKM'16.
[IJCAI] with Yiu-ming Cheung, “Efficient Generalized Conditional Gradient with Gradient Sliding for Composite Optimization", IJCAI'15.
[ACML] with Yiu-ming Cheung, “Proximal Average Approximated Incremental Gradient Method for Composite Penalty Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization", ACML'15.
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ACM CCS): 2026-2024 2022
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR): 2026 (Area Chair) 2025 2024
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML): 2025-2024 (Area Chair) 2023-2022
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI): 2026-2025 (Senior PC) 2022-2019
IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (IEEE EuroS&P): 2025
International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB): 2024 2023
Conference on Language Modeling (COLM): 2024
IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR): 2024
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS): 2023 2022
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD): 2022
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI): 2022
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI): 2022 2021 2020 2019
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS): 2021
ACM International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL): 2021 2020
IEEE International Conference on Big Data (IEEE Bigdata): 2021 2020
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering
ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
IEEE Signal Processing Letters
IEEE Communications Letters