Kaiyuan Zhang | 张开元 Ph.D. Student Department of Computer Science Purdue University 305 N. University Street West Lafayette, IN 47907 Email: zhan4057 at purdue dot edu Google Scholar | dblp | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn

I am a Ph.D. student in the Department 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, especially in safe & responsible large language models, backdoor attacks and defenses, distributed training.

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. I was a research intern at NEC Labs America.

Research Opportunities: I am always happy to discuss and brainstorm; if you’re a researcher/student (especially underrepresented minorities) interested in security, privacy, or robust AI (Generative AI most recent, e.g., GPT, Llama, PaLM, DALL-E), please reach out with subject “[Prospective collaboration]” to zhan4057 at purdue dot edu.

What’s New

• 03/2024. I will join Amazon Bedrock (Generative AI, Seattle) as an Applied Scientist Intern this summer!
• 09/2023. Excited to be featured in NEC News for the summer intern project!
• 05/2023. I will join NEC Labs America (San Jose) as a Research Intern this summer!
• 11/2022. I am co-organizing the workshop on Backdoor Attacks and Defenses in Machine Learning (BANDS) at ICLR 2023! We invite submissions on any aspect of backdoor attacks and defenses in machine learning!
• 10/2022. Excited to be featured in Purdue News for the Best Paper Award at ECCV 2022 AROW Workshop!

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

• 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 (Oakland 2024)
  [paper (coming soon)] [code]
• 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 Awards

• Best Paper Award at ECCV 2022 AROW Workshop, October 2022
• Purdue University Summer Research Grant Award, April 2022
• ACM CCS Student Conference Grant, October 2020
• China National Scholarship (0.2% in China), November 2016

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
• Journal Reviewers
  • IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)
  • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC)
  • ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS)
• Conference/Workshop Reviewers
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023, 2024
  • Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023
  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 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
• External Reviewers
  • ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS)
  • USENIX Security Symposium (Security)
  • IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE)
  • ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA)
  • International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification (CAV)
• Student Volunteers
  • ICML 2021, ICLR 2021, ECOOP/ISSTA 2021, CCS 2020, SIGMOD 2020