Guanhong Tao

me.png

I am an incoming Assistant Professor in Kahlert School of Computing at the University of Utah starting Fall 2024. 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 / ECCV / ACL, and ICSE / FSE. I am a recipient of Maurice H. Halstead Memorial Award (for exemplary contributions to software engineering research), ECCV AROW Workshop Best Paper Award (2022), and OOPSLA 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.

News

Jun, 2024 One paper accepted to USENIX Security 2024. Congrats to Shengwei and Lu!
May, 2024 Invited to serve on the Program Committee of IEEE S&P 2025
May, 2024 Successfully passed the Ph.D. dissertation defense
Apr, 2024 Four papers to appear in IEEE S&P 2024

Selected Publications

  1. S&P
    Distribution Preserving Backdoor Attack in Self-supervised Learning
    Guanhong Tao*, Zhenting Wang*, Shiwei Feng, Guangyu Shen, Shiqing Ma, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2024
  2. S&P
    On Large Language Models’ Resilience to Coercive Interrogation
    Zhuo Zhang, Guangyu Shen, Guanhong Tao, Siyuan Cheng, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 45th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2024
  3. USENIX Security
    Hard-label Black-box Universal Adversarial Patch Attack
    Guanhong Tao, Shengwei An, Siyuan Cheng, Guangyu Shen, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 32nd USENIX Security Symposium, Anaheim, CA, USA, 2023
  4. ACL
    Backdooring Neural Code Search
    Weisong Sun*, Yuchen Chen*, Guanhong Tao*, Chunrong Fang, Xiangyu Zhang, Quanjun Zhang, and Bin Luo
    In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Toronto, Canada, 2023
  5. NDSS
    BEAGLE: Forensics of Deep Learning Backdoor Attack for Better Defense
    Siyuan Cheng, Guanhong Tao, Yingqi Liu, Shengwei An, Xiangzhe Xu, Shiwei Feng, Guangyu Shen, Kaiyuan Zhang, Qiuling Xu, Shiqing Ma, and  others
    In Proceedings of the 30th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, San Diego, CA, USA, 2023
  6. ICLR
    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, and  others
    In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, Kigali, Rwanda, 2023
  7. NeurIPS
    BIRD: Generalizable Backdoor Detection and Removal for Deep Reinforcement Learning
    Xuan Chen, Wenbo Guo, Guanhong Tao, Xiangyu Zhang, and Dawn Song
    In Proceedings of Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, New Orleans, LA, USA, 2023
  8. CVPR
    Detecting Backdoors in Pre-trained Encoders
    Shiwei Feng, Guanhong Tao, Siyuan Cheng, Guangyu Shen, Xiangzhe Xu, Yingqi Liu, Kaiyuan Zhang, Shiqing Ma, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Vancouver, Canada, 2023
  9. S&P
    Model Orthogonalization: Class Distance Hardening in Neural Networks for Better Security
    Guanhong Tao, Yingqi Liu, Guangyu Shen, Qiuling Xu, Shengwei An, Zhuo Zhang, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2022
  10. S&P
    PICCOLO: Exposing Complex Backdoors in NLP Transformer Models
    Yingqi Liu, Guangyu Shen, Guanhong Tao, Shengwei An, Shiqing Ma, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2022
  11. FSE
    RULER: Discriminative and Iterative Adversarial Training for Deep Neural Network Fairness
    Guanhong Tao*, Weisong Sun*, Tingxu Han*, Chunrong Fang, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Singapore, 2022
  12. CVPR
    Better Trigger Inversion Optimization in Backdoor Scanning
    Guanhong Tao, Guangyu Shen, Yingqi Liu, Shengwei An, Qiuling Xu, Shiqing Ma, Pan Li, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, New Orleans, LA, USA, 2022
  13. ICSE
    TRADER: Trace Divergence Analysis and Embedding Regulation for Debugging Recurrent Neural Networks
    Guanhong Tao, Shiqing Ma, Yingqi Liu, Qiuling Xu, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Seoul, South Korea, 2020
  14. CCS
    ABS: Scanning Neural Networks for Back-doors by Artificial Brain Stimulation
    Yingqi Liu, Wen-Chuan Lee, Guanhong Tao, Shiqing Ma, Yousra Aafer, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, London, United Kingdom, 2019
  15. NDSS
    NIC: Detecting Adversarial Samples with Neural Network Invariant Checking
    Shiqing Ma, Yingqi Liu, Guanhong Tao, Wen-Chuan Lee, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 26th Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, San Diego, CA, USA, 2019
  16. NeurIPS
    Attacks Meet Interpretability: Attribute-steered Detection of Adversarial Samples
    Guanhong Tao, Shiqing Ma, Yingqi Liu, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of Thirty-second Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Montréal, Canada, 2018

Awards & Honors

Teaching

  • Guest Lecture, CS 431: Software Engineering, Rutgers University, Spring 2023

  • Guest Lecture, CS 529: Security Analytics, Purdue University, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2022, Fall 2023

  • Teaching Assistant, CS 240: Programming in C, Purdue University, Spring 2020

  • Teaching Assistant, CS 590: Program Analysis For Deep Learning, Purdue University, Fall 2019

Services

  • Program Chair / Organizer
  • Program Committee / Reviewer
    • IEEE S&P  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy: 2021 (Shadow), 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
    • 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
    • AAAI  Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: 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