Publications

• Data Poisoning Attacks to Locally Differentially Private Triangle Counting Protocols

Tingxuan Han, Wei Tong, Zijian Wang, Sheng Zhong

IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2027)

• When Does Visual Generation Help Visual Understanding in Unified Multimodal Models?

Yubo Zhu, Zhehan Kan, Jingyi Yang, Miaolin Chen, Jinbo Xing, Kai Zhu, Zijian Wang, Sheng Zhong, Wei Tong

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026 Main Conference)

• When Charts Deceive Web Agents: A Paired Benchmark for Misleading Visualization-Grounded Tasks

Yisheng Li, Dongming Han, Hongkun Pan, Bingcheng Mao, Zijian Wang, Yunlong Mao, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026 Findings)

• KFS-RAG: Mitigating Database Leakage in RAG Systems with Keyword-Grounded Fact Substitution

ZiLiang Zhang, Yubo Zhu, Wei Tong, Jingyu Hua, Zijian Wang, Yuan Zhang, Sheng Zhong

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2026 Findings)

• VIVAS: Vitalizing Visual Perception in VLM Pre-training via Vision-language Unified Autoregressive Supervision

Zhehan Kan, Yubo Zhu, Xinghua Jiang, Zhixiang Wei, Shifeng Liu, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Qingmin Liao, Wenming Yang, Xin Li, Yinsong Liu, Deqiang Jiang, Xing Sun

The 19th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2026)

• Protecting Against Unauthorized Dataset Use in Fine-Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Yubo Zhu, Songrui Wang, Wei Tong, Zijian Wang, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, 2026

• Preventing Dataset Misuse in Stable Diffusion for Multi-User Sharing

Yubo Zhu, Xinyue Zhao, Zijian Wang, Wei Tong, Yunlong Mao, Sheng Zhong

The IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2026)

• Designing Wallet-Based User Intervention for Approval Phishing Mitigation

Maggie Yongqi Guan, Yuqi Xu, Yunlong Mao, Wei Tong, Xiaobo Zhou, Kanye Ye Wang

The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (Security 2026)

• Auditing Data Provenance in LLM Fine-tuning via Intrinsic Distributional Fingerprints

Zirui Huang. Yunlong Mao, Wei Tong, Tingting Wu, Xin Ge, Sheng Zhong

ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2026)

• ProSan: Utility-based Prompt Privacy Sanitizer

Zhili Shen, Zihang Xi, Ying He, Wei Tong, Jingyu Hua, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, 2026

• When and Where You Nudge Matters: Multi-Step Interface Interventions Against Address Poisoning in Crypto Wallets

Yuqi Xu, Maggie Yongqi Guan, Yunlong Mao, Xin Yi, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Xiaobo Zhou, and Kanye Ye Wang

ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST 2026)

• Multi-Shuffler: Decentralized Shuffling for Differential Privacy in Mobile Edge Computing

Wenjie Chen, Xinhao Huang, Yubo Zhu, Tingxuan Han, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong

The 46th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS 2026)

• Semantic-Aware Address Sanitization With Metric Differential Privacy

Ziliang Zhang, Wei Tong, Sungu Junjie, Sheng Zhong

IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2026)

• Resource Exhaustion Attack Over Dominant Privacy-Budget Scheduling

Wenjie Chen, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2026)

• The LLM Already Knows: Estimating LLM-Perceived Question Difficulty via Hidden Representations

Yubo Zhu, Dongrui Liu, Zecheng Lin, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong, Jing Shao

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025 Main Conference)

• Differentially Private Triangle Counting Assisted by k-Anonymity in Two-Party Models

Tingxuan Han, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong

IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE 2025)

• Secure Two-Party Frequent Itemset Mining With Guaranteeing Differential Privacy

Wenjie Chen, Haoyu Chen, Tingxuan Han, Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 24, pp. 276-292, Jan. 2025 

• Data Poisoning Attacks to Locally Differentially Private Frequent Itemset Mining Protocols [code]

Wei Tong, Haoyu Chen, Jiacheng Niu, Sheng Zhong

ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2024)

• Backdoor Attack Against Split Neural Network-Based Vertical Federated Learning

Ying He, Zhili Shen, Jingyu Hua, Qixuan Dong, Jiacheng Niu, Wei Tong, Xu Huang, Chen Li, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, vol. 19, pp. 748-763, 2024

• Scalable Differentially Private Model Publishing via Private Iterative Sample Selection

Wei Tong, Jiacheng Niu, Jingyu Hua, Qun Li, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 2494-2506, July/Aug. 2024

• Differentially Private Two-Party Top-k Frequent Item Mining

Wei Tong, Wenjie Chen, Tingxuan Han, Haoyu Chen, Sheng Zhong

The 43rd IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing (ICDCS 2023)

• Understanding Location Privacy of the Point-of-Interest Aggregate Data via Practical Attacks and Defenses

Wei Tong, Yinggang Tong, Chang Xia, Jingyu Hua, Qun Li, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 2433-2449, May/Jun. 2023

• Privacy-Preserving Data Integrity Verification for Secure Mobile Edge Storage

Wei Tong, Wenjie Chen, Bingbing Jiang, Fengyuan Xu, Qun Li, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, vol. 22, no. 9, pp. 5463-5478, Sept. 2023

• Practical Location Privacy Attacks and Defense on Point-of-interest Aggregates

Wei Tong, Chang Xia, Jingyu Hua, Qun Li, and Sheng Zhong

The 41st IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing (ICDCS 2021)

• Privacy-Preserving Data Integrity Verification in Mobile Edge Computing

Wei Tong, Bingbing Jiang, Fengyuan Xu, Qun Li, Sheng Zhong

The 39th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing (ICDCS 2019)

• A Jointly Differentially Private Scheduling Protocol for Ridesharing Services

Wei Tong, Jingyu Hua, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, vol. 12, no. 10, pp. 2444-2456, Oct. 2017

• A Unified Resource Allocation Framework for Defending against Pollution Attacks in Wireless Network Coding Systems

Wei Tong, Sheng Zhong

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, vol. 11, no. 10, pp. 2255-2267, Oct. 2016

Professional Services

PC Member

• USENIX Security '27; WSDM '27; ICDCS '25, '26; ECML '26; WWW '26; Globecom '21 - '26; IJCNN'25, '26 (Area Chair)

Publications Co-Chair: ICCCN'26

Reviewer

• IEEE TKDE, IEEE TDSC, IEEE TMC, IEEE TIFS, IEEE TWC, IEEE TVT, IEEE TCOM, IEEE TCC, Information Fusion, Computer Networks, Information Sciences, Pattern Recognition, IEEE IoT Journal, Computers & Security, Expert Systems With Applications, ...

Teaching

• Introduction to Information and Computer Science - Experiments, Fall 2020/2021/2022/2023/2024/2025, Nanjing University

• Data Structure and Algorithm Analysis, Fall 2025, Nanjing University

• Computer Networks, Fall 2025, Nanjing University

• Network Security and Intrusion Detection, Fall 2020-2024, Nanjing University

Students

• Wenjie Chen 2021 - Doctoral student

• Tingxuan Han 2022 - Doctoral student

• Zijian Wang 2025 - Doctoral student

• Yubo Zhu 2025 - Doctoral student (intern at Tongyi Lab)

• Yisheng Li 2025 - Doctoral student (intern at HiThink)

• Yixiang Pan 2026 - Doctoral student

• Juntao Su 2026 - Doctoral student

• Xiannong Ding 2024 - Master's student (intern at Meituan)

• Ruizhe Song 2024 - Master's student (intern at ByteDance)

• Miaolin Chen 2025 - Master's student

• Guo Cheng 2026 - Master's student

Alumni

• Jiacheng Niu M.S. 2020 - 2023 -> e2uninova

• Yinggang Tong M.S. 2020 - 2023 -> Microsoft

• Haoyu Chen M.S. 2022 - 2025 -> Huawei

• Ziliang Zhang M.S. 2023 - 2026 -> State Grid Corporation of China