Research

It has been a long journey.

Research Interests

• Robust Machine Learning, Safety Verification, Computer Vision, Knowledge Graph.

Work Experience

• • Reseach Scientist: Safe Intelligence, Working on Verification, Januray 2025 - Present.
• • Reseach Associate: Imperial College London, in Safe Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL). Working on project EVENFLOW, September 2024 - Present.
• • Reseach Assistant: University of Liverpool, part-time in Trustworthy ACPS Lab. Working on projects FOCETA and EnnCore, January 2023 - September 2024.
• • Reseach Intern: Huawei Technologies Research and Development (UK), part-time in Knowledge Graph Team, Edinbutgh Research Center. Working on editing knowledge in Semantic Parsing, May 2021 - September 2021.
• • Reseach Intern: Huawei Technologies Research and Development (UK), full-time in Knowledge Graph Team, Edinbutgh Research Center. Working on consistency checking in knowledge graph, November 2019 - January 2020.

Publications

• • X. Huang, W. Ruan, W. Huang, G. Jin, Y. Dong, C. Wu, S. Bensalem, R. Mu, Y. Qi, X. Zhao, K. Cai, Y. Zhang, S. Wu, P. Xu, D. Wu, A. Freitas and M. A. Mustafa. A Survey of Safety and Trustworthiness of Large Language Models through the Lens of Verification and Validation, Artificial Intelligence Review (2024).
• • Y. Zhang, W. Ruan, F. Wang and X. Huang. Generalizing universal adversarial perturbations for deep neural networks, Machine Learning, 112(5): 1597-1626 (2023).
• • S. Zeng, B. Zhang, Y. Zhang and J. Gou. Dual Sparse Learning via Data Augmentation for Robust Facial Image Classification, International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 11(3): 1717–1734 (2020).
• • Y. Zhang, S. Zeng, W. Zeng and J. Gou. GNN-CRC: Discriminative Collaborative Representation-Based Classification via Gabor Wavelet Transformation and Nearest Neighbor, J. Shanghai Jiao Tong Univ. (Sci.), 23(5): 657-665 (2018).

Conferences

• • T. Zhang, Y. Zhang, R. Mu, J. Liu, J. Fieldsend and W. Ruan. PRASS: Probabilistic Risk-averse Robust Learning with Stochastic Search, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2024).
• • Y. Zhang, T. Zhang, R. Mu, X. Huang and W. Ruan. Towards Fairness-Aware Adversarial Learning, Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2024). [Code]
• • R. Mu, L. Marcolino, Y. Zhang, T. Zhang, X. Huang and W. Ruan. Reward Certification for Policy Smoothed Reinforcement Learning, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI 2024). [Code]
• • T. Zhang, J. Liu, Y. Zhang, R. Mu, X. Huang and W. Ruan. DeepGRE: Global Robustness Evaluaion of Deep Neural Networks, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2024).
• • F. Wang, Z. Fu, Y. Zhang and W. Ruan. Self-adaptive Adversarial Training for Robust Medical Segmentation, Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2023). [Code]
• • F. Wang, Y. Zhang, Y. Zheng and W. Ruan. Dynamic Efficient Adversarial Training Guided by Gradient Magnitude, NeurIPS 2022 TEA Workshop. [Code]
• • Y. Zhang, F. Wang and W. Ruan. Fooling Object Detectors: Adversarial Attacks by Half-Neighbor Masks, CIKM 2020 AnalytiCup Workshop. [Code]
• • Y. Zhang, W. Ruan, F. Wang, and X. Huang. Generalizing Universal Adversarial Attacks Beyond Additive Perturbations, The IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2020), November 17-20, 2020, Sorrento, Italy. [Code] [Video]
• • S. Zeng, B. Zhang, Y. Zhang and J. Gou. Collaboratively Weighting Deep and Classic Representation via L2 Regularization for Image Classification, Proceedings of The 10th Asian Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR 95:502-517, 2018.
• • Y. Zhang, S. Zeng, W. Zeng and H. Jiang. Synthetic Training Samples for Enhanced Locality-Constrained Dictionary Learning, The 2nd Asian Conference on Artificial Intelligence Technology (2018), Chongqing, China, Jun. 8-10. The Journal of Engineering, (2018) 2018(16): 1761-1767. [Oral Presentation, Best Session Paper]

Preprint

• • Y. Dong, R. Mu, Y. Zhang, S. Sun, T. Zhang, C. Wu, G. Jin, Y. Qi, J. Hu, J. Meng, S. Bensalem and X. Huang. Safeguarding Large Language Models: A Survey, 2024.
• • N. Berthier, Y. Sun, W. Huang, Y. Zhang, W. Ruan and X. Huang. Tutorials on Testing Neural Networks, 2021.

Teaching Assistant

• TA for ECMM422 Machine Learning, University of Exeter, 2021
• TA for ECMM458 Machine Learning (professional), University of Exeter, 2020
• PGR Demonstrator for MSc AI/DS Students, University of Exeter, 2020-2021

Academic Services

• Journal Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering/Information Sciences/Machine Vision and Applications/The Visual Computer
• Conference Reviewer: ICLR/NeurIPS/ECCV/CVPR/ICCV/CIKM/ICCV/ICML/AISTATS
• External Conference Reviewer: ECML-PKDD/IJCAI/ECAI