Yuchen Yang

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.

Publications

Conference Papers

2025

CertPHash: Towards Certified Perceptual Hashing via Robust Training
Yuchen Yang, Qichang Liu, Christopher Brix, Huan Zhang, Yinzhi Cao
To appear in the Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium, 2025
paper (coming soon) | code (coming soon)

2024

Follow the Rules: Reasoning for Video Anomaly Detection with Large Language Models
Yuchen Yang, Kwonjoon Lee, Behzad Dariush, Yinzhi Cao, Shao-Yuan Lo
In the Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
paper | code

SafeGen: Mitigating Sexually Explicit Content Generation in Text-to-Image Models
Xinfeng Li*, Yuchen Yang*, Jiangyi Deng*, Chen Yan, Yanjiao Chen, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu
In the Proceedings of The ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2024
(* Co-first Authors)
paper | code

Ripplecot: Amplifying ripple effect of knowledge editing in language models via chain-of-thought in-context learning
Zihao Zhao, Yuchen Yang, Yijiang Li, Yinzhi Cao
In the Findings of Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2024
The first author finished the paper mainly under my mentoring.
paper | code

SneakyPrompt: Jailbreaking Text-to-image Generative Models
Yuchen Yang, Bo Hui, Haolin Yuan, Neil Gong, Yinzhi Cao
In the Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2024
Reported by MIT Technology Review and IEEE Spectrum.
Listed among Normalized Top-100 Security Papers.
paper | slides | code

2023

PrivateFL: Accurate, Differentially Private Federated Learning via Personalized Data Transformation
Yuchen Yang*, Bo Hui*, Haolin Yuan*, Neil Gong, Yinzhi Cao
In the Proceedings of USENIX Security Symposium, 2023
Artifact Badges: Artifacts Available, Artifacts Functional, Results Reproduced.
(* Co-first Authors)
paper | code

Fortifying Federated Learning against Membership Inference Attacks via Client-level Input Perturbation
Yuchen Yang, Haolin Yuan, Bo Hui, Neil Gong, Yinzhi Cao
In the Proceedings of IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN) 2023
paper | code

2022

Addressing Heterogeneity in Federated Learning via Distributional Transformation
Haolin Yuan*, Bo Hui*, Yuchen Yang*, Philippe Burlina, Neil Gong, Yinzhi Cao
In the Proceedings of European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2022
(* Co-first Authors)
paper | code

2021

Practical Blind Membership Inference Attack via Differential Comparisons
Bo Hui*, Yuchen Yang*, Haolin Yuan*, Philippe Burlina, Neil Gong, Yinzhi Cao
In the Proceedings of Network & Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2021
(* Co-first Authors)
paper | slides | code

Preprints

Jailbreaking Safeguarded Text-to-Image Models via Large Language Models
Zhengyuan Jiang, Yuepeng Hu, Yuchen Yang, Yinzhi Cao, Neil Zhenqiang Gong
paper | code (coming soon)

Pseudo-Probability Unlearning: Towards Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Machine Unlearning
Zihao Zhao, Yijiang Li, Yuchen Yang, Wenqing Zhang, Nuno Vasconcelos, Yinzhi Cao
paper | code (coming soon)

Services

Conference/Journal Reviewing

Program Committee

• IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2026
• The ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2025
• ACM Workshop on Adaptive and Autonomous Cyber Defense (AACD), 2024

Reviewer

• International Conference of Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
• IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2023/2024
• IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security (T-IFS), 2024

Artifact Evaluation Committee

• IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), 2024

External Reviewer

• IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2025
• ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS), 2024
• USENIX Security Symposium, 2023/2024
• The ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2022
• IEEE Computer Security Foundations Symposium (CSF), 2022/2024
• IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2022

Organizing and Chairing

Session Chair

• IEEE Workshop on Deep Learning Security and Privacy (DLSP), 2024

Miscellaneous

My Chinese name is 杨雨晨. "雨晨" means "rainy morning," as I was born on a rainy morning :)

I share my life with two lovely cats: