Guanhong Tao

I am an Assistant Professor in Kahlert School of Computing at University of Utah. My research focuses on the security and safety of AI-enabled systems, aiming to empower system providers and individual users to counteract attacks. I am broadly interested in a range of topics in security and privacy relating to machine learning, including adversarial generative AI, security/privacy of LLM agents, and machine learning for security. My projects are consistently published in conferences such as IEEE S&P / USENIX Security / CCS / NDSS, NeurIPS / ICML / ICLR / CVPR, and ICSE / FSE. I am a recipient of NVIDIA Academic Grant Award (2025), Maurice H. Halstead Memorial Award (2023), and ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award (2019). I obtained my Ph.D. from Purdue University under the supervision of Dr. Xiangyu Zhang.
News
Sep, 2025 | Our backdoor attacks against RL agents is accepted to NeurIPS 2025. Congrats to Xuan! |
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Aug, 2025 | Our work on detecting AI-generated text origin is to appear in EMNLP 2025. Congrats to Hanxi! |
Jul, 2025 | We are proud to announce that Open Philanthropy is supporting our work! |
Apr, 2025 | Our paper on threat modeling of LLM applications got accepted to FSE LLMapp Workshop. |
Selected Publications
Awards & Honors
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NVIDIA Academic Grant Award, 2025
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ECCV 2022 AROW Workshop Best Paper Award, Oct 2022
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ICLR Highlighted Reviewer, Apr 2022
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CSAW 2021 Best Applied Security Paper Award TOP-10 Finalists, Nov 2021
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ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award, Oct 2019
Students
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Kang Yang (co-advised with Dr. Jun Xu)
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Wanjing Han (co-advised with Dr. Mu Zhang)
Teaching
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CS 6958 / CS 4960: Machine Learning Security, University of Utah, Fall 2024 - 2025
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CS 5956: Intro to Machine Learning, University of Utah, Spring 2025
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Guest Lecture, COMPSCI 360: Introduction to Computer and Network Security, UMass Amherst, Spring 2024
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Guest Lecture, CS 431: Software Engineering, Rutgers University, Spring 2023
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Guest Lecture, CS 529: Security Analytics, Purdue University, Fall 2019 - 2020, 2022 - 2023
Services
- Program Chair / Organizer
- BANDS The 1st ICLR Workshop on Backdoor Attacks and Defenses in Machine Learning
- AISCC NDSS 2024 Workshop on AI System with Confidential Computing
- Program Committee / Reviewer
- S&P IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy:
2025
,2026
- USENIX USENIX Security Symposium:
2026
- CCS ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security:
2025
- SaTML IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning:
2025
,2026
- RAID International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses:
2024
- FSE ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering:
2023
(Artifact Evaluation) - NeurIPS Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems:
2021
-2025
- ICML International Conference on Machine Learning:
2021
-2025
- ICLR International Conference on Learning Representations:
2022
(Highlighted) -2026
- CVPR IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition:
2022
,2023
,2025
- ECCV European Conference on Computer Vision:
2022
- ICCV International Conference on Computer Vision:
2023
,2025
- ACL Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics:
2023
,2025
- EMNLP Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing:
2023
- AISTATS International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics:
2025
- AAAI Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence:
2024
,2026
- DLSP Deep Learning Security and Privacy Workshop (co-located with S&P):
2025
- LLMapp International Workshop on LLM App Store Analysis (co-located with FSE):
2025
- SATA NeurIPS Workshop on Towards Safe & Trustworthy Agents:
2024
- AGI ICLR AGI Workshop:
2024
- DPML ICLR Workshop on Distributed and Private Machine Learning:
2021
- TDSC IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
- TIFS IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security
- TSE IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
- TOPS ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security
- TMLR Transactions on Machine Learning Research
- ASE Automated Software Engineering (Springer)
- S&P IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy: