Kaiyuan Zhang How to pronounce? PhD candidate Purdue University Office: 305 N. University Street West Lafayette, IN, 47907-2107 Email: [email protected] Google Scholar | dblp | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn

I am a PhD candidate of Computer Science at Purdue University, co-advised by Prof. Ninghui Li and Prof. Xiangyu Zhang. My research interests focus on security and privacy in machine learning, recently in safe & responsible large language models.

My research is partially supported by the Amazon Fellowship. I was a research intern at Amazon and NEC Labs America during my PhD. Before joining Purdue, I spent a wonderful year as a visiting graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, co-advised by Prof. Tao Xie and Prof. Tianyin Xu. I received an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Dallas, advised by Prof. Wei Yang. I was a full-time research assistant advised by Prof. Wei Chen for 1.5 years at Zhejiang University before starting grad school.

Research Opportunities: I am always happy to discuss and brainstorm; if you’re a researcher/student interested in privacy, security, or AI safety (LLMs most recent), please reach out to [email protected].

Office Hours: I owe a lot to my patient research mentors who generously spent their time helping me along the way. From Sept. 2024, I will dedicate 2 hours each week to offer mentorship to undergrad and grad students on any topics you’d like to discuss. If you’re interested, please fill out the AMA form.

Selected Publications [Full List] [Google Scholar] [dblp] (*: equal contribution)

• CENSOR: Defense Against Gradient Inversion via Orthogonal Subspace Bayesian Sampling
  Kaiyuan Zhang, Siyuan Cheng, Guangyu Shen, Bruno Ribeiro, Shengwei An, Pin-Yu Chen, Xiangyu Zhang, Ninghui Li
  Proceedings of the 32nd Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS 2025)
  [paper] [code] [website]
• Source Code Foundation Models are Transferable Binary Analysis Knowledge Bases
  Zian Su, Xiangzhe Xu, Ziyang Huang, Kaiyuan Zhang, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024)
  [paper] [code]
• Rethinking the Invisible Protection against Unauthorized Image Usage in Stable Diffusion
  Shengwei An*, Lu Yan*, Siyuan Cheng, Guangyu Shen, Kaiyuan Zhang, Qiuling Xu, Guanhong Tao, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2024)
  [paper] [code]
• Exploring the Orthogonality and Linearity of Backdoor Attacks
  Kaiyuan Zhang*, Siyuan Cheng*, Guangyu Shen, Guanhong Tao, Shengwei An, Anuran Makur, Shiqing Ma, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P 2024)
  [paper] [code] [slides] [video] [poster] [website]
• FLIP: A Provable Defense Framework for Backdoor Mitigation in Federated Learning
  Kaiyuan Zhang, Guanhong Tao, Qiuling Xu, Siyuan Cheng, Shengwei An, Yingqi Liu, Shiwei Feng, Guangyu Shen, Pin-Yu Chen, Shiqing Ma, Xiangyu Zhang
  Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR 2023)
  ECCV 2022 Workshop on Adversarial Robustness in the Real World (AROW 2022), Best Paper Award 🏆
  [paper] [code] [slides] [media coverage]

Selected Honors & Awards

• Apple Scholar Nominee, 2025
• Amazon Fellowship, 2024
• Best Paper Award at the AROW Workshop at ECCV 2022
• Purdue Summer Research Grant, Purdue University, 2022
• National Scholarship (top 0.2% in China), 2016

Teaching

Guest Lecture

• “Backdoor Attacks and Defenses in Machine Learning”. Guest lecture at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, COMPSCI 360: Introduction to Computer and Network Security, Grad Level, invited by Prof. Shiqing Ma, Fall 2023.
  
• “Backdoor Attacks and Defenses in Machine Learning”. Guest lecture at Purdue University, CS 52900: Security Analytics, Grad Level, invited by Prof. Berkay Celik, Fall 2022.
  

Teaching Assistant

• CS 59200: AI And Security, Grad Level (Head TA), Prof. Xiangyu Zhang, Purdue University, Fall 2024.
• CS 37300: Data Mining and Machine Learning, Undergrad Level, Prof. Bruno Ribeiro and Prof. Dan Goldwasser, Purdue University, Fall 2022.
  
• CS 37300: Data Mining and Machine Learning, Undergrad Level, Prof. Steve Hanneke, Purdue University, Spring 2022.
  
• CS 47300: Web Information Search And Management, Undergrad Level, Prof. Hisham R. Benotman, Purdue University, Fall 2021.
  
• CS 18200: Foundations of Computer Science, Undergrad Level, Prof. Andres Bejarano, Purdue University, Summer 2021.
• CS 37300: Data Mining and Machine Learning, Undergrad Level, Prof. Jean Honorio, Purdue University, Spring 2021.
  
• CS 47300: Web Information Search And Management, Undergrad Level, Prof. Christopher W. Clifton, Purdue University, Fall 2020.
  
• Visual Analytics, Undergrad Level, Prof. Wei Chen, Zhejiang University, Summer 2018.

Professional Services

• Organizers
  • The 1st Workshop on Backdoor Attacks and Defenses in Machine Learning (BANDS) at ICLR, 2023
  • Machine Learning & Security Seminar at Purdue University, 2021, 2022, 2023
• Program Committee Member
  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024, 2025
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023, 2024, 2025
  • Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023, 2024
  • IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024
  • IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 2023
  • ICLR Workshop on Privacy Regulation and Protection in Machine Learning, 2024
  • ICML Workshop on Federated Learning and Analytics in Practice, 2023
  • ICML Workshop on Adversarial Machine Learning Frontiers, 2022
• Journal Reviewers
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2023, 2024
  • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2023
  • ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS), 2023
• External Reviewers
  • ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
  • USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2024, 2025
  • IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML), 2025
  • ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), 2024
  • IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2023
• Student Volunteers
  • ICML 2021, ICLR 2021, ECOOP/ISSTA 2021, CCS 2020, SIGMOD 2020

Personal

• Kaiyuan Zhang’s name is pronounced as
• Basketball is my favorite, I’ve been playing it weekly for more than ten years.
• I love tennis, especially the moments of hitting the ball with the right amount of spin and force.
• I also enjoy kayaking, quietly exploring a creek, enjoy views that can’t be seen from shore.
• I consider myself lucky to be guided by helpful advice and instructions. Here are some notes I collect from time to time.