Guanhong Tao
"There is only one heroism in the world: to see the world as it is and to love it." ― Romain Rolland
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 and biases. I am broadly interested in a range of topics in security and privacy relating to machine learning, including backdoor threats, adversarial generative AI, 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 Maurice H. Halstead Memorial Award, ECCV AROW Workshop Best Paper Award (2022), and ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Paper Award (2019).
I obtained my Ph.D. from Purdue University under the supervision of Xiangyu Zhang. I received my bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University.
I am looking for students interested in security and privacy at the intersection of machine learning and traditional systems. If you are interested in this research direction, please drop me an email with your CV and transcripts.
News
Oct, 2024 | One paper accepted to NeurIPS 2024 Workshop Red Teaming GenAI |
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Sep, 2024 | One paper on detecting AI-generated text got accepted to NeurIPS 2024 |
Sep, 2024 | Our paper on detecting backdoors in LLMs got accepted to S&P 2025 |
Aug, 2024 | Our work on exploring inherent backdoors got accepted to ACSAC 2024 |
Selected Publications
- S&PBAIT: Large Language Model Backdoor Scanning by Inverting Attack TargetIn Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2025
- NeurIPSBiScope: AI-generated Text Detection by Checking Memorization of Preceding TokensIn Proceedings of Thirty-Eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Vancouver, Canada, 2024
Awards & Honors
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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 Jun Xu)
Teaching
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CS 6958 / CS 4960: Machine Learning Security, University of Utah, Fall 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, Fall 2020, Fall 2022, Fall 2023
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Teaching Assistant, CS 240: Programming in C, Purdue University, Spring 2020
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Teaching Assistant, CS 590: Program Analysis For Deep Learning, Purdue University, Fall 2019
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:
2021
(Shadow),2025
- SaTML IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning:
2025
- 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
,2022
,2023
,2024
- ICML International Conference on Machine Learning:
2021
,2022
,2023
,2024
- ICLR International Conference on Learning Representations:
2022
(Highlighted),2023
,2024
,2025
- CVPR IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition:
2022
,2023
- ECCV European Conference on Computer Vision:
2022
- ICCV International Conference on Computer Vision:
2023
- ACL Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics:
2023
- 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
- SATA NeurIPS Workshop on Towards Safe & Trustworthy Agents:
2024
- DPML ICLR Workshop on Distributed and Private Machine Learning:
2021
- AGI ICLR AGI Workshop:
2024
- TDSC IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
- T-IFS IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security
- TOPS ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security
- TMLR Transactions on Machine Learning Research
- S&P IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy: