Guanhong Tao

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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

  1. ICSE
    Rethinking the Evaluation of Secure Code Generation
    Shih-Chieh Dai, Jun Xu, and Guanhong Tao
    In Proceedings of the 48th International Conference on Software Engineering, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2026
  2. S&P
    Alleviating the Fear of Losing Alignment in LLM Fine-tuning
    Kang Yang, Guanhong Tao, Xun Chen, and Jun Xu
    In Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, USA, 2025
  3. S&P
    BAIT: Large Language Model Backdoor Scanning by Inverting Attack Target
    Guangyu Shen, Siyuan Cheng, Zhuo Zhang, Guanhong Tao, Kaiyuan Zhang, Hanxi Guo, Lu Yan, Xiaolong Jin, Shengwei An, Shiqing Ma, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of the 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, San Francisco, USA, 2025
  4. NeurIPS
    BiScope: AI-generated Text Detection by Checking Memorization of Preceding Tokens
    Hanxi Guo, Siyuan Cheng, Xiaolong Jin, Zhuo Zhang, Kaiyuan Zhang, Guanhong Tao, Guangyu Shen, and Xiangyu Zhang
    In Proceedings of Thirty-Eighth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Vancouver, Canada, 2024
  5. 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
  6. 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

Awards & Honors

Students

Teaching

Services

  • Program Chair / Organizer
  • 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)

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the following organizations for their generous support of our research (listed in alphabetical order).

NSF NVIDIA Open Philanthropy