Shuai Zhao   College of Computing and Data Science Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 639798. Email: shuai.zhao αt ntu dοt edu dοt sg 📚 Google Scholar Citations: 858

Biography

Hi! I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, advised by Prof. Anh Tuan Luu . I received my PhD degree in 2024 from Jinan University, where I was advised by Prof. Weiqi Luo and Prof. Jinming Wen . During my PhD, I also spent one year as a visiting student and six months as a research assistant at Nanyang Technological University.

🤔My research interests include Model Security, Backdoor Attack, Large Language Models. I keep collobration with my friends Dr. Yanhao Jia on Multi-Modal Tasks, Dr. Xinyi Wu on AI4Education, and Dr. Xuan Feng on Trustworthy AI.

🤝Note: I am always interested in working with self-motivated students. If you have a strong interest in large language model and model security, please feel free to contact me.

News

Publications

2025

1. Shuai Zhao, Yulin Zhang, Luwei Xiao, Xinyi Wu, Yanhao Jia, Zhongliang Guo, Xiaobao Wu, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Guoming Zhang, and Anh Tuan Luu. Affective-roptester: Capability and bias analysis of llms in predicting retinopathy of prematurity[J]. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2025.
2. Guo, Zhongliang, Chun Tong Lei, Lei Fang, Shuai Zhao^*, Yifei Qian, Jingyu Lin, Zeyu Wang, Cunjian Chen, Ognjen Arandjelović, and Chun Pong Lau. A grey-box attack against latent diffusion model-based image editing by posterior collapse[J]. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2025. (Corresponding Authors)
3. Man, Hu, Yahui Ding, Yatao Yang^*, Liangyu Chen, Yanhao Jia, and Shuai Zhao^*. DUP: Detection-guided Unlearning for Backdoor Purification in Language Models[C]. AAAI, 2026. (Corresponding Authors)
4. Yanhao Jia, Xinyi Wu, Hao Li, Qinglin Zhang, Yuxiao Hu, Shuai Zhao^*, Wenqi, Fan. Uni-Retrieval: A Multi-Style Retrieval Framework for STEM's Education[C]. ACL, 2025. (Corresponding Author)
5. Shuai Zhao, Xiaobao Wu, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Yanhao Jia, Meihuizi Jia, Yichao Feng, Luu Anh Tuan. Unlearning Backdoor Attacks for LLMs with Weak-to-Strong Knowledge Distillation[C]. ACL, 2025.
6. Shuai Zhao, Meihuizi Jia, Zhongliang Guo, Leilei Gan, Xiaoyu Xu, Xiaobao Wu, Jie Fu, Yichao Feng, Fengjun Pan, Luu Anh Tuan. A Survey of Recent Backdoor Attacks and Defenses in Large Language Models[J]. Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2025.（Survey Certification）
7. Xiaobao Wu, Liangming Pan, Yuxi Xie, Ruiwen Zhou, Shuai Zhao, Yubo Ma, Mingzhe Du, Rui Mao, Anh Tuan Luu, William Yang Wang. AntiLeak-Bench: Preventing Data Contamination by Automatically Constructing Benchmarks with Updated Real-World Knowledge[C]. ACL, 2025. (Oral)
8. Yichao, Feng, Haoran Luo, Lang Feng, Shuai Zhao, and Anh Tuan Luu. From Stimuli to Minds: Enhancing Psychological Reasoning in LLMs via Bilateral Reinforcement Learning[C]. AAAI, 2026. (Oral)
9. Man Hu, Yatao Yang, Deng Pan, Zhongliang Guo, Luwei Xiao, Deyu Lin, Shuai Zhao. Syntactic Paraphrase-based Synthetic DataGeneration for Backdoor Attacks Against ChineseLanguage Models[J]. Information Fusion, 2025.
10. Yifei Qian, Zhongliang Guo, Bowen Deng, Chun Tong Lei, Shuai Zhao, Chun Pong Lau, Xiaopeng Hong, Michael P. Pound T2ICount: Enhancing Cross-modal Understanding for Zero-Shot Counting[C]. CVPR, 2025. (Highlight)
11. Cong-Duy T Nguyen, Xiaobao Wu, Thong Thanh Nguyen, Shuai Zhao, Khoi M. Le, Nguyen Viet Anh, Feng Yichao, Anh Tuan Luu. Enhancing Multimodal Entity Linking with Jaccard Distance-based Conditional Contrastive Learning and Contextual Visual Augmentation[C]. NAACL, 2025.
12. Yichao Feng, Shuai Zhao, Yueqiu Li, Luwei Xiao, Xiaobao Wu, Anh Tuan Luu. Aspect-Based Summarization with Self-Aspect Retrieval Enhanced Generation[C]. IJCNN, 2025.
13. Luwei Xiao, Rui Mao, Shuai Zhao, Qika Lin, Yanhao Jia, Liang He, Erik Cambria. Exploring Cognitive and Aesthetic Causality for Multimodal Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis[J]. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing, 2025.
14. Zhongliang Guo, Yifei Qian, Shuai Zhao, Junhao Dong, Yanli Li, Ognjen Arandjelovi\'c, Lei Fang, Chun Pong Lau. Artwork Protection Against Unauthorized Neural Style Transfer and Aesthetic Color Distance Metric[J]. Pattern Recognition, 2025.

2024

1. Shuai Zhao, Xiaoyu Xu, Luwei Xiao, Jinming Wen, Luu Anh Tuan. Clean-label Backdoor Attack and Defense: An Examination of Language Model Vulnerability[J]. Expert Systems With Applications, 2024.
2. Shuai Zhao, Meihuizi Jia, Anh Tuan Luu, Fengjun Pan, Jinming Wen. Universal Vulnerabilities in Large Language Models: Backdoor Attacks for In-context Learning[C]. Proceedings of the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2024.
3. Shuai Zhao, Anh Tuan Luu, Jie Fu, Jinming Wen, Weiqi Luo. Exploring Clean Label Backdoor Attacks and Defense in Language Models[J]. IEEE-ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2024.
4. Shuai Zhao, Jie Tian, Jie Fu, Jie Chen, Jinming Wen. FeaMix: Feature Mix with Memory Batch Based on Self-consistency Learning for Code Generation and Code Translation[J]. IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence, 2024.
5. Shuai Zhao, Leilei Gan, Anh Tuan Luu, Jie Fu, Lingjuan Lv, Miehuizi Jia, Jinming Wen. Defending Against Weight-Poisoning Attacks for Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, NAACL, 2024
6. Qing Li, Shuai Zhao, Tengjiao He, Jinming Wen. A Simple and Efficient Filter Feature Selection Method via Document-Term Matrix Unitization[J]. Pattern Recognition Letters, 2024.

2023

1. Shuai Zhao, Jinming Wen, Anh Tuan Luu, Junbo Zhao, Jie Fu. Prompt as Triggers for Backdoor Attack: Examining the Vulnerability in Language Models[C]. Proceedings of the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.
2. Shuai Zhao, Qing Li, Yuer Yang, Jinming Wen, Weiqi Luo. From Softmax to Nucleusmax: A Novel Sparse Language model for Chinese Radiology Report Summarization[J]. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 2023.
3. Mengchao Zhang, Kai Jiang, Shuai Zhao, Nini Hao, Yuan Zhang. Deep-learning-based multistate monitoring method of belt conveyor turning section[J]. Structural Health Monitoring, 2023.
4. Qing Li, Shuai Zhao, Shancheng Zhao, Jinming Wen. Logistic Regression Matching Pursuit algorithm for text classification[J]. Knowledge-Based Systems, 2023: 110761.

2022 and before

1. Shuai Zhao, Zhuoqian Liang, Jinming Wen, Jie Chen. Sparsing and smoothing for the seq2seq models[J]. IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2022: 1-10.
2. Shuai Zhao, Qing Li, Tengjiao He, Jinming Wen. A Step-by-Step Gradient Penalty with Similarity Calculation for Text Summary Generation[J]. Neural Processing Letters, 2022: 1-16.
3. Shuai Zhao, Tengjiao He, Jinming Wen. Sparse summary generation[J]. Applied Intelligence, 2023, 53(2): 2042-2054.
4. Shuai Zhao, Tianyu Zhang, Man Hu, Wen Chang, Fucheng You. AP-BERT: enhanced pre-trained model through average pooling[J]. Applied Intelligence, 2022, 52: 15929–15937.
5. Shuai Zhao, Fucheng You, Wen Chang, Tianyu Zhang, Man Hu. Augment BERT with average pooling layer for Chinese summary generation[J]. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 2022, 42(3): 1859-1868.
6. Zihao He, Yuer Yang, Shuai Zhao^*. Towards Pre-trained Language Model for Dynamic Disturbance[J]. The 3rd International Academic Exchange Conference on Science and Technology Innovation (IAECST), 2021, 480-484.

Preprint

1. Shuai Zhao, Xinyi Wu, Shiqian Zhao, Xiaobao Wu, Zhongliang Guo, Yanhao Jia and Anh Tuan Luu. P2P: A Poison-to-Poison Remedy for Reliable Backdoor Defense in LLMs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.04503 (2025).
2. Shuai Zhao, Leilei Gan, Zhongliang Guo, Xiaobao Wu, Luwei Xiao, Xiaoyu Xu, Cong-Duy Nguyen, and Luu Anh Tuan. Breaking PEFT Limitations: Leveraging Weak-to-Strong Knowledge Transfer for Backdoor Attacks in LLMs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.17946 (2024).
3. Man, Hu, Xinyi Wu, Zuofeng Suo, Jinbo Feng, Mengling Hui, Yanhao Jia, Anh Tuan Luu, and Shuai Zhao. Rethinking Reasoning: A Survey on Reasoning-based Backdoors in LLMs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.07697 (2025). (Corresponding Author)
4. Wang, Kaixuan, Chenxin Diao, Jason T. Jacques, Zhongliang Guo, and Shuai Zhao. HRIPBench: Benchmarking LLMs in Harm Reduction Information Provision to Support People Who Use Drugs. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.21815 (2025). (Corresponding Author)
5. Wu, Xinyi, Yanhao Jia, Luwei Xiao, Shuai Zhao, Fengkuang Chiang, and Erik Cambria. From query to explanation: Uni-rag for multi-modal retrieval-augmented learning in stem. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.03868 (2025). (Corresponding Author)
6. Wen, Jinming, Xinyi Wu, Shuai Zhao, Yanhao Jia, and Yuwen Li. Investigating Vulnerabilities and Defenses Against Audio-Visual Attacks: A Comprehensive Survey Emphasizing Multimodal Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.11521 (2025). (Corresponding Author)
7. Jia, Yanhao, Xinyi Wu, Qinglin Zhang, Yiran Qin, Luwei Xiao, and Shuai Zhao. Towards robust evaluation of stem education: Leveraging mllms in project-based learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.17050 (2025). (Corresponding Author)
8. Guo, Zhongliang, Yifei Qian, Yanli Li, Weiye Li, Chun Tong Lei, Shuai Zhao, Lei Fang, Ognjen Arandjelović, and Chun Pong Lau. Beyond Vulnerabilities: A Survey of Adversarial Attacks as Both Threats and Defenses in Computer Vision Systems. arXiv e-prints (2025): arXiv-2508.
9. Nguyen, Cong-Duy, Xiaobao Wu, Duc Anh Vu, Shuai Zhao, Thong Nguyen, and Anh Tuan Luu. CutPaste&Find: Efficient Multimodal Hallucination Detector with Visual-aid Knowledge Base. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.12591 (2025).
10. Xiao, Wenyi, Zechuan Wang, Leilei Gan, Shuai Zhao, Wanggui He, Luu Anh Tuan, Long Chen, Hao Jiang, Zhou Zhao, and Fei Wu. A comprehensive survey of datasets, theories, variants, and applications in direct preference optimization. arXiv e-prints (2024): arXiv-2410.

Education and Professional Experience

Selected Honors and Awards

Academic Service