Yuchen Yang
Assistant Professor
College of Information Sciences and Technology
The Pennsylvania State University
yuchen [dot] yang [at] psu [dot] edu
413A Eric J. Barron Innovation Hub
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About
I'm an Assistant Professor of College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. My research spans security, privacy, and AI, with a current interest in trustworthy generative AI systems:
- Algorithms, Theory, and Infrastructure: Developing foundational algorithms and scalable systems to ensure trustworthiness, including attacks, provable defenses for large language or vision models, and trade-offs between trustworthiness, functionality, and efficiency.
- Applications and User-Centered Perspectives: Addressing real-world societal challenges posed by generative AI systems, including unsafe content generation (featured in MIT Technology Review), privacy risks in health care, and online trust.
Previously, I received my Ph.D. in the Department of Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University, where I was advised by Dr. Yinzhi Cao. I also worked closely with Dr. Neil Gong from Duke University during my doctoral study.
Openings: Seeking Ph.D. students, research interns, and visiting scholars. If you’re interested, please read this.
News
- 10/2025: Funded by NSF NAIRR Pilot Project!
- 10/2025: I will serve as a PC member on the ACM CCS and EuroSys 2026.
- 07/2025: Awarded a travel grant by USENIX Security. See you in Seattle!
- 07/2025: I will serve as a PC member on the USENIX Security 2026.
- 05/2025: I've been listed as a notable reviewer for ICLR 2025.
- 03/2025: I will serve as a PC member on the IEEE S&P 2026.
- 01/2025: Our paper on certified robust PHash has been accepted by Usenix Security 2025.
- 01/2025: Our paper SneakyPrompt is listed among Normalized Top-100 Security Papers!
- 12/2024: I will serve as a PC member of the Machine Learning and Security Track on ACM CCS 2025.
- 11/2024: Invited talk on zero-shot video anomaly detection at Voxel51.
- 10/2024: Invited talk on Trustworthy AI at Monash University.
- 09/2024: Paper on knowledge editing in LLMs accepted by EMNLP 2024.
- 07/2024: Paper on video anomaly detection using LLMs accepted by ECCV 2024.
- 05/2024: Paper on mitigating unsafe generation accepted by ACM CCS 2024.
- 11/2023: Paper on jailbreaking text-to-image models accepted by S&P 2024.