YUCHEN
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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 focuses on security, privacy, and trustworthy generative AI systems.

  • Secure and Efficient AI Inference Systems: Developing algorithms and system-level techniques to ensure reliable behavior during inference, with a focus on efficiency-aware security, as well as scalable deployment and trade-offs between trustworthiness, utility, and efficiency.
  • User-Centered Trust and Real-World AI Risks: Understanding and mitigating real-world harms from AI systems, including unsafe content (featured in MIT Technology Review), online trust, and privacy risks in health care.

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

  • 03/2026: Received Penn State SSRI AI Award!
  • 12/2025: Two projects funded by NSF NAIRR Pilot Award!
  • 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.

Experiences

  • Assistant Professor, at Penn State University, 2025.7 - Present

  • Research Assistant, at Johns Hopkins University, 2020.3 - 2025.5

  • Student Associate, at Honda Research Institute, 2023.10 - 2024.2

  • Research Assistant, at Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2018.6 - 2018.9