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
| Oct, 2025 | Our paper on secure code generation got accepted to ICSE 2026. Congrats to Shih-Chieh! |
|---|---|
| Oct, 2025 | I am honored to receive CCS 2025 Top Reviewers Award! |
| Sep, 2025 | Our backdoor attacks against RL agents is accepted to NeurIPS 2025. Congrats to Xuan! |
| Aug, 2025 | Our work on detecting AI-generated text origin is to appear in EMNLP 2025. Congrats to Hanxi! |
Selected Publications
Awards & Honors
-
NVIDIA Academic Grant Award, 2025
-
ECCV 2022 AROW Workshop Best Paper Award, Oct 2022
-
ICLR Highlighted Reviewer, Apr 2022
-
CSAW 2021 Best Applied Security Paper Award TOP-10 Finalists, Nov 2021
-
ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award, Oct 2019
Students
-
Soumil Datta (co-advised with Dr. Daniel Brown)
-
Kang Yang (co-advised with Dr. Jun Xu)
-
Wanjing Han (co-advised with Dr. Mu Zhang)
Teaching
-
CS 6958 / CS 4960: Machine Learning Security, University of Utah, Fall 2024, 2025
-
CS 5956: Intro to Machine Learning, University of Utah, Spring 2025
-
Guest Lecture, COMPSCI 360: Introduction to Computer and Network Security, UMass Amherst, Spring 2024
-
Guest Lecture, CS 431: Software Engineering, Rutgers University, Spring 2023
-
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(Top Reviewers),2026 - SaTML IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning:
2025,2026 - 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 - ICCV International Conference on Computer Vision:
2023,2025 - ECCV European Conference on Computer Vision:
2022 - ACL Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics:
2023,2025 - EMNLP Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing:
2023 - AAAI Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence:
2024,2026 - AISTATS International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics:
2025 - RAID International Symposium on Research in Attacks, Intrusions and Defenses:
2024 - FSE ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering:
2023(Artifact Evaluation) - 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
- TOSEM ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
- 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:
Acknowledgements
We are very grateful to the following organizations for their generous support of our research (listed in alphabetical order).
