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: 779

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, and Dr. Xinyi Wu on AI4Education.

🤝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

• [2025.10]  🎉🎉 Invited to serve as Area Chair for ARR; serve as Academic Editor for IET Biometrics Journal.
• [2025.07]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at Pattern Recognition.
• [2025.05]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at Information Fusion.
• [2025.05]  🎉🎉 Three papers accepted at ACL2025.
• [2025.04]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing.
• [2025.04]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at IJCNN2025.
• [2025.02]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at CVPR2025 (Highlight).
• [2025.01]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at NAACL2025.
• [2025.01]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at Transactions on Machine Learning Research (Survey Certification).
• [2024.11]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at Expert Systems With Applications.
• [2024.09]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at EMNLP2024.
• [2024.05]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at IEEE-ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing.
• [2024.04]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computational Intelligence.
• [2024.03]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at NAACL2024.
• [2023.10]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at EMNLP2023.
• [2023.05]  🎉🎉 One paper accepted at ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing.

Preprint

• 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).
• 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. arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.05816 (2025).
• 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).
• Man, Hu, Yahui Ding, Yatao Yang, Liangyu Chen, Yanhao Jia, and Shuai Zhao. DUP: Detection-guided Unlearning for Backdoor Purification in Language Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.01647 (2025). (Corresponding Authors)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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)
• 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.
• 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).
• 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.
• 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. arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.10901 (2024).

Publications

2025

• 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)
• 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.
• 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)
• 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.
• 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）
• 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)
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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
• 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

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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

• Shuai Zhao, Zhuoqian Liang, Jinming Wen, Jie Chen. Sparsing and smoothing for the seq2seq models[J]. IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence, 2022: 1-10.
• 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.
• Shuai Zhao, Tengjiao He, Jinming Wen. Sparse summary generation[J]. Applied Intelligence, 2023, 53(2): 2042-2054.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Education and Professional Experience

Selected Honors and Awards

Academic Service