Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
University of Nevada, Reno
Ph.D., Electrical Engineering
University of Texas at San Antonio, 2022
Advisor: Yanmin Gong
B.Eng., Electrical Engineering
Jinan University, China, 2017
I study how AI systems can learn and operate securely, privately, and efficiently when data and computing resources are distributed.
My group works on:
AI security: text/model watermarking, jailbreaks, backdoors, adversarial attacks
Data privacy: differential privacy, privacy-preserving machine learning
Efficient distributed/federated learning: resource-aware federated learning, foundation model finetuning, edge AI
Join my group: I am recruiting Ph.D. students with assistantship support for Fall 2027 and welcome inquiries about remote research internships. UNR students interested in AI research are also welcome to contact me.
10/2026 Our project “Reliable AI Agent for Wildfire Alert” received support through the NSF EPSCoR HDRFS Data Analytics Research Internship Program.
09/2026 Another work on Text-to-video (T2V) generation "PhyMetric: Diagnosing Physical Plausibility in Text-to-Video Generation via Scene-Level QA" was also accepted by NeurIPS 2026! Thanks to our collaborators.
09/2026 Our paper "Majority Bit-Aware Watermarking for Large Language Models" has been accepted by NeurIPS 2026! Congratulations to Jiahao!
09/2026 Our paper "SelfGrader: LLM Jailbreak Detection via Anchored Token-Level Logits" has been accepted by AACL 2026! Congratulations to Zikai! 🎉
09/2026 Invited talk "Efficient Federated Fine-Tuning under Resource Heterogeneity" in The 3rd Workshop on Federated and Privacy-Preserving AI for HPC In conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing 2026.
09/2026 Our paper "Privacy Foundations for Multi-Institutional Scientific Artificial Intelligence" has been accepted by Fifth Annual Workshop on Cyber Security in High Performance Computing (S-HPC'26).
08/2026 Our paper "Vision Token Manipulation Attacks on Cloud-Edge Inference of Large Vision-Language Models" was accepted by IEEE GLOBECOM2026! Congratulations to Zikai! 🎉
07/2026 Congratulations to our RET Site teachers on successfully completing their summer program! One of their posters, “Living on the Edge-AI,” won the Best Poster Award at the 2026 NSF Virtual RET Site Participant Poster Session! 🎉
05/2026 Congratulations to my undergraduate student, Mia Fisher, whose research project, “Evaluating the Reliability and Robustness of LLM-Based Fire Detection and Data Analysis Systems Against Prompt Injection,” has been selected for funding through the NSF EPSCoR Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP).
05/2026 Our project "FPGA-Accelerated LLM Inference Framework for Secure Edge AI" is funded by Research and Enhancement Grant at UNR. 🎉
05/2026 Our project "REU Site: Undergraduate Research Experience in Edge Intelligence" is funded by NSF! 🎉 Thank you, NSF!
04/2026 Our work "XMark: Reliable Multi-Bit Watermarking for LLM-Generated Texts" was accepted by ACL 2026 as a main conference paper (Top 15%). Congratulations to Jiahao!
04/2026 Congratulations to Jiahao for receiving the Outstanding Graduate Student Researcher Scholarship at UNR! 🎉👏
01/2026 Our paper "Optimal Client Sampling in Federated Learning with Client-level Heterogeneous Differential Privacy" has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IEEE IoT-J)! Congratulations to Jiahao!
01/2026 Our paper "Traceable Black-Box Watermarks For Federated Learning" was accepted by ICLR 2026! Congratulations to Jiahao!
01/2026 Our paper "Heterogeneous Federated Fine-Tuning with Parallel One-Rank Adaptation" was accepted by ICLR 2026! Congratulations to Zikai!
01/2026 I am invited to serve as TPC member for Communication and Information System Security at IEEE GLOBECOM 2026.
12/2025 I am honored to have been selected as a 2025 Exemplary Editor of the IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (OJCOMS).
11/2025 Congratulations to Jiahao and Zikai on receiving the Best Poster Award at the UNR Cybersecurity Conference 2025.
10/2025 Congratulations to Zikai and Jiahao on receiving travel grants from Graduate Student Association at UNR, Mobihoc 2025, and NSF EPSCoR HDRFS program!
09/2025 Our work "FlowerTune: A Cross-Domain Benchmark for Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models" was accepted by NeurIPS 2025! 🎉
08/2025 Our project "Research Infrastructure: MRI: Acquisition of a High-Performance GPU Cluster for Large-Scale AI" is funded by NSF! 🎉
07/2025 Our paper "On the Out-of-Distribution Backdoor Attack for Federated Learning" has been accepted by ACM MobiHoc 2025 (acceptance rate 23%). Congratulations, Jiahao!
06/2025 Our project "RET Site: Research Experience on Edge Artificial Intelligence for Nevada Teachers" is funded by NSF! Looking forward to sharing more—our project website is available online.
06/2025 Our paper "Fed-HeLLo: Efficient Federated Foundation Model Fine-Tuning with Heterogeneous LoRA Allocation" is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (IEEE TNNLS). Congratulations to Zikai! 🎉👏
04/2025 Congratulations to Jiahao on receiving the CVPR 2025 Travel Award! 🎉👏
02/2025 Our paper "Detecting Backdoor Attacks in Federated Learning via Direction Alignment Inspection" is accepted by CVPR 2025 (highlight). Congratulations to Jiahao. 🎉👏
02/2025 I serve as the Associate Editor for IEEE Open Journal of the Communications Society (OJCOMS).
01/2025 Jiahao's research project, "Towards Robust Water Leak Detection via Federated Learning with Sparsified Local Models," has been awarded the 2024 Nevada WateReuse Research Grant. Congratulations, Jiahao! 🎉👏
12/2024 Our work "Power-Optimized Field-Programmable Gate Array Implementation of Neural Activation Functions Using Continued Fractions for AI/ML Workloads" has been published!
11/2024 Our paper "Identify Backdoored Model in Federated Learning via Individual Unlearning" is accepted by WACV 2025. Congratulations to Jiahao on this achievement! Code has been released!
10/2024 Our work "Fed-piLot: Optimizing LoRA Assignment for Efficient Federated Foundation Model Fine-Tuning" is in arXiv. In this work, we optimize the local LoRA-based foundation model fine-tuning tasks for clients with heterogeneous memory resources in federated learning.
08/2024 Our paper "Achieving Byzantine-Resilient Federated Learning via Layer-Adaptive Sparsified Model Aggregation" is accepted by WACV 2025. Congratulations, Jiahao! Code has been released!
06/2024 I received the NSF EPSCoR HDRFS seed grant as a sole PI.
09/2023 Congratulations to Zikai for receiving the IEEE CNS student travel grant and UNR GSA Travel Award!
08/2023 Our paper on defending against byzantine attacks in federated learning has been accepted by IEEE CNS 2023. Congratulations, Zikai!
03/2023 I received the Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award from UTSA!
08/2022 Our paper "Agent-Level Differentially Private Federated Learning via Compressed Model Perturbation" was accepted by IEEE CNS 2022!
05/2022 I served as a TPC member of the IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC) 2023.
05/2022 I received the Outstanding Graduate Research Award of UTSA!
04/2022 I defended my Ph.D. dissertation!
03/2022 I will join the CSE department, University of Nevada, Reno, as a tenure-track assistant professor in July 2022!
03/2022 Our paper "Energy-Efficient Distributed Machine Learning at Wireless Edge with Device-to-Device Communication" was accepted by IEEE ICC 2022!
02/2022 I served as a TPC member of the 19th Annual International Conference on Privacy, Security, and Trust (PST) 2022.
01/2022 Our paper "Hybrid Local SGD for Federated Learning with Heterogeneous Communications" was accepted by ICLR 2022 and selected for a spotlight presentation (5%).
06/2021 I served as a TPC member of IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC) 2021.
04/2021 Our paper "Federated Learning with Sparsification-Amplified Privacy and Adaptive Optimization" was accepted by IJCAI 2021 (Acceptance ratio: 13.9%).