Publications

22 publications · 12 accepted · 10 preprints & under review. Also on Google Scholar.

Accepted 12

Journal articles 1

Conference papers 8

[C8]WACV 2027CORE A

Quantize Where the Noise Hides: A Self-Correction Theorem and Water-Filling Bit Allocation for Diffusion Sampling

Xiaoyu Li, Zheng Gao, Zhizhou Sha, Jiaojiao Jiang

Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV ’27), Algorithms Track, 2027

  • NAS / efficiency
  • Learning theory

Summary Proves a self-correction theorem for quantized diffusion sampling (Wasserstein-2 error bounded by the sensitivity-weighted sum of per-step quantization errors) and derives a water-filling mixed-precision bit allocation that explains the early-coarse / late-fine rule; on a pretrained CIFAR-10 DDPM it is the most faithful allocation to the full-precision sampler at every budget.

[C7]WACV 2027CORE A

Capacity Meters That Change Sign: Diagnosing Zero-Cost NAS Proxy Transport Across Search Spaces

Zhenyu Liu, Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Zhiyuan Jiang, Yang Song, Jiaojiao Jiang

Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV ’27), Evaluations and Datasets Track, 2027

  • NAS / efficiency

Summary Diagnoses why zero-cost NAS proxies can rank against accuracy when transported across search spaces: on NAS-Bench-201 a dominant capacity-associated factor explains 52.9%/49.4% of a 29-feature proxy zoo’s variation, and several raw proxies reverse sign (condition-number sum +0.88 → −0.77); two controlled search traps cost +5.40 and +1.97 points at K=10.

[C6]DICTA 2026

Conformal Calibration of Co-Visibility Scores for Connected View Graphs

Zheng Gao, Junlin Yu, Wanrui Pang, Xiaoyu Li, Yang Song, Jiaojiao Jiang

Proceedings of the International Conference on Digital Image Computing: Techniques and Applications (DICTA ’26), 2026

Accepted; first-author work

  • Vision
  • Learning theory

Summary Proposed a scene-level conformal calibration rule for co-visibility scores with finite-sample connectivity guarantees; obtained 15/17 connected proxy-positive test graphs, versus 11/17 for a fixed threshold and 2/17 for top-30% selection.

[C4]BMVC 2026CORE AOral

SLICE: Semantic Latent Injection via Compartmentalized Embedding for Image Watermarking

Zheng Gao, Yifan Yang, Xiaoyu Li, Xiaoyan Feng, Haoran Fan, Yang Song, Jiaojiao Jiang

Proceedings of the British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC ’26), 2026

First-author work — complementary defense to the WWW ’26 attack paper

  • Watermarking

Summary Proposed SLICE, which injects watermark signals into compartmentalized regions of the semantic latent space; led model design, theoretical analysis and evaluation, with statistical false-accept-rate guarantees and robustness to semantic-guided regeneration attacks.

[C3]ACM MM 2026CORE A*

LAVA: Layered Audio-Visual Anti-tampering Watermarking for Robust Deepfake Detection and Localization

Bokang Zeng, Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Xiaoyan Feng, Jiaojiao Jiang

Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM ’26), 2026

  • Watermarking
  • Deepfake detection

Summary Contributed core algorithmic design and experimental validation of a layered, cross-modal watermarking framework that embeds tamper-sensitive signals across audio and visual streams, enabling deepfake detection and segment-level localization.

[C1]WWW 2026CORE A*

Breaking Semantic-Aware Watermarks via LLM-Guided Coherence-Preserving Semantic Injection

Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Zhicheng Bao, Xiaoyan Feng, Jiaojiao Jiang

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2026 (WWW ’26, Short Paper Track), Dubai, United Arab Emirates, April 13–17, 2026, pp. 8569–8572

  • Watermarking
  • Attacks

Summary Identified that the semantic-binding mechanism of content-aware semantic watermarking can be bypassed by globally coherent semantic rewrites, and proposed CSI, an LLM-guided attack that invalidates state-of-the-art schemes while keeping image fidelity. Led the work end-to-end.

[C5]AICIT 2024

A Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Attack Detection Model: G-RXAD

Zheng Gao

2024 3rd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Computer Information Technology (AICIT), Yichang, China, IEEE, 2024

Sole-authored undergraduate work

  • Security

Summary Proposed G-RXAD, a deep-reinforcement-learning-based model for network / system attack detection.

Workshop papers 3

[W1]NeurIPS 2026 STODYOral

SHIFT: Stochastic Hidden-Trajectory Deflection for Removing Diffusion-based Watermark

Rui Bao*, Zheng Gao*, Xiaoyu Li, Xiaoyan Feng, Yang Song, Jiaojiao Jiang

NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on AI for Stochastic Dynamics (STODY), 2026

* Equal first-author contribution

  • Watermarking
  • Attacks

Summary Co-led a training-free attack that stochastically deflects the reverse denoising trajectory to remove diffusion watermarks; evaluated against nine watermarking methods with 95–100% reported attack success.

[W3]NeurIPS 2026 InfPrivPoster

Sharp Privacy Profiles for Bounded Validation Retries

Xiaoyu Li, Zheng Gao, Penghao Jiang, Zhicheng Bao, Jiaojiao Jiang

NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Beyond Private Training: The New Landscape of AI Privacy (InfPriv), 2026

  • Privacy
  • Learning theory

Summary Contributed to an exact worst-case privacy analysis of retry-until-valid wrappers around pure ε-differentially-private inference routines, with a closed-form worst-case envelope that stays bounded away from zero as the attempt cap grows.

[W2]NeurIPS 2026 Continual LearningPoster

How Much Must We Test After an Agent Update? Certifying Retention in Continually Learning Agents

Xiaoyu Li, Zheng Gao, Penghao Jiang, Zhicheng Bao, Jiaojiao Jiang

NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Continual Learning in the Era of Foundation Models and Embodied Agents, 2026

  • LLM agents
  • Learning theory

Summary Contributed to a study of how much testing is needed to certify that an agent update retains earlier capabilities; a frozen model-selection update raised GSM8K accuracy by 11.0 points with the tested historical policy preserved.

Preprints & under review 10

[P1]Preprint

Rethinking Visual Provenance: Detection and Watermarking Across Direct Visual Generation and LLM-Driven Code Rendering

Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Zhicheng Bao, Jiaojiao Jiang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2610.08137, 2026

First-author work — conceptual research agenda

  • Watermarking
  • Deepfake detection
  • Vision

Summary First-authored a research agenda comparing detection and watermarking for visuals from generative models versus LLM-written code, and posed ten scoped research questions.

[P5]Preprint

DRIFT: Removing Diffusion Watermarks by Deflecting the Generative Trajectory

Rui Bao*, Zheng Gao*, Xiaoyu Li, Xiaoyan Feng, Yang Song, Jiaojiao Jiang

arXiv preprint arXiv:2609.08213, 2026

* Equal first-author contribution

  • Watermarking
  • Attacks

Summary Co-developed DRIFT, a black-box attack that removes diffusion watermarks by partial forward diffusion followed by stochastic reverse resampling; 98–100% attack success across nine watermarks in three paradigms.

[P6]Preprint

TRACE: A Two-Channel Robust Attribution Watermark via Complementary Embeddings for LLM-Agent Trajectories

Zheng Gao, Xiaoyu Li, Xiaoyan Feng, Jiaojiao Jiang, Yang Song, Yulei Sui, Zhenchang Xing, Liming Zhu

arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.08400, 2026

First-author work — public project page with interactive demo

  • Watermarking
  • LLM agents

Summary Proposed TRACE, which stamps two complementary watermark channels onto an LLM agent’s decision trajectory so attribution survives deleted or rewritten steps. Led design, implementation and evaluation.

[P9]Preprint

Are LLMs Better GNN Helpers? Rethinking Robust Graph Learning under Deficiencies with Iterative Refinement

Zhaoyan Wang, Zheng Gao, Arogya Kharel, In-Young Ko

arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.01910, 2025

External collaboration with KAIST

  • Graph learning

Summary Co-designed RoGRAD, the first iterative paradigm that uses RAG to inject class-consistent augmentations with iterative graph contrastive learning, yielding up to 82.4% average improvement over conventional GNN- and LLM-enhanced baselines.