Tianyuan Zhang

Dr. Tianyuan Zhang


Research Focus & Metrics

Academic Career Length

4Years (2023-Present)

(Calculated once Scilit publication data is synced: current year − year of first publication + 1)

Representative Publications

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30 June 2025 in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
ZYZonghao Ying
Zonghao Ying
Aishan LiuAishan Liu
Aishan Liu
TZTianyuan Zhang
Tianyuan Zhang
ZYZhengmin Yu
Zhengmin Yu
SLSiyuan Liang
Siyuan Liang
DTDacheng Tao
Dacheng Tao
In the realm of large vision language models (LVLMs), jailbreak attacks serve as a red-teaming approach to bypass guardrails and uncover safety implications. Existing jailbreaks predominantly focus on the visual modality, perturbing solely visual inputs in the prompt for attacks. However, they fall short when confronted with aligned models that fuse visual and textual features simultaneously for generation. To address this limitation, this paper introduces the Bi-Modal Adversarial Prompt Attack (BAP), which executes jailbreaks by optimizing textual and visual prompts cohesively. Initially, we adversarially embed universally adversarial perturbations in an image, guided by a few-shot query-agnostic corpus (e.g., affirmative prefixes and negative inhibitions). This process ensures that the adversarial image prompt LVLMs to respond positively to harmful queries. Subsequently, leveraging the image, we optimize textual prompts with specific harmful intent. In particular, we utilize a large language model to analyze jailbreak failures and employ chain-of-thought reasoning to refine textual prompts through a feedback-iteration manner. To validate the efficacy of our approach, we conducted extensive evaluations on various datasets and LVLMs, demonstrating that our BAP significantly outperforms other methods by large margins (+29.03% in attack success rate on average). Additionally, we showcase the potential of our attacks on black-box commercial LVLMs, such as GPT-4o and Gemini.

27 March 2025 in IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
Verified
Journal Article
Closed access
Aishan LiuAishan Liu
Aishan Liu
YZYuguang Zhou
Yuguang Zhou
Xianglong LiuXianglong Liu
Xianglong Liu
TZTianyuan Zhang
Tianyuan Zhang
SLSiyuan Liang
Siyuan Liang
DTDacheng Tao
Dacheng Tao
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the development of embodied intelligence. By providing a few contextual demonstrations (such as rationales and solution examples) developers can utilize the extensive internal knowledge of LLMs to effortlessly translate complex tasks described in abstract language into sequences of code snippets, which will serve as the execution logic for embodied agents. However, this paper uncovers a significant backdoor security threat within this process and introduces a novel method called Contextual Backdoor Attack. By poisoning just a few contextual demonstrations, attackers can covertly compromise the contextual environment of a black-box LLM, prompting it to generate programs with context-dependent defects. These programs appear logically sound but contain defects that can activate and induce unintended behaviors when the operational agent encounters specific triggers in its interactive environment. To compromise the LLM’s contextual environment, we employ adversarial in-context generation to optimize poisoned demonstrations, where an LLM judge evaluates these poisoned prompts, reporting to an additional LLM that iteratively optimizes the demonstration in a two-player adversarial game using chain-of-thought reasoning. To enable context-dependent behaviors in downstream agents, we implement a dual-modality activation strategy that controls both the generation and execution of program defects through textual and visual triggers. We expand the scope of our attack by developing five program defect modes that compromise key aspects of confidentiality, integrity, and availability in embodied agents. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we conducted extensive experiments across various tasks, including robot planning, robot manipulation, and compositional visual reasoning. Additionally, we demonstrate the potential impact of our approach by successfully attacking real-world autonomous driving systems. The contextual backdoor threat introduced in this study poses serious risks for millions of downstream embodied agents, given that most publicly available LLMs are third-party-provided. This paper aims to raise awareness of this critical threat. Our code and demos are available at https://contextual-backdoor.github.io/.

15 December 2023 in Visual Intelligence
Verified
Journal Article
Open access
PDF file
YXYisong Xiao
Yisong Xiao
Aishan LiuAishan Liu
Aishan Liu
TZTianyuan Zhang
Tianyuan Zhang
Haotong QinHaotong Qin
Haotong Qin
Jinyang GuoJinyang Guo
Jinyang Guo
Xianglong LiuXianglong Liu
Xianglong Liu
Quantization has emerged as an essential technique for deploying deep neural networks (DNNs) on devices with limited resources. However, quantized models exhibit vulnerabilities when exposed to various types of noise in real-world applications. Despite the importance of evaluating the impact of quantization on robustness, existing research on this topic is limited and often disregards established principles of robustness evaluation, resulting in incomplete and inconclusive findings. To address this gap, we thoroughly evaluated the robustness of quantized models against various types of noise (adversarial attacks, natural corruption, and systematic noise) on ImageNet. The comprehensive evaluation results empirically provide valuable insights into the robustness of quantized models in various scenarios. For example: 1) quantized models exhibit higher adversarial robustness than their floating-point counterparts, but are more vulnerable to natural corruption and systematic noise; 2) in general, increasing the quantization bit-width results in a decrease in adversarial robustness, an increase in natural robustness, and an increase in systematic robustness; 3) among corruption methods, impulse noise and glass blur are the most harmful to quantized models, while brightness has the least impact; 4) among different types of systematic noise, the nearest neighbor interpolation has the highest impact, while bilinear interpolation, cubic interpolation, and area interpolation are the three least harmful. Our research contributes to advancing the robust quantization of models and their deployment in real-world scenarios.

27 October 2025
Verified
Conference Paper
Open access
LWLe Wang
Le Wang
ZYZonghao Ying
Zonghao Ying
TZTianyuan Zhang
Tianyuan Zhang
SLSiyuan Liang
Siyuan Liang
SHShengshan Hu
Shengshan Hu
Xianglong LiuXianglong Liu
Xianglong Liu

28 October 2024
Verified
Conference Paper
Open access
XZXinwei Zhang
Xinwei Zhang
Aishan LiuAishan Liu
Aishan Liu
TZTianyuan Zhang
Tianyuan Zhang
SLSiyuan Liang
Siyuan Liang
Xianglong LiuXianglong Liu
Xianglong Liu
Deep learning-based lane detection (LD) plays a critical role in autonomous driving systems, such as adaptive cruise control. However, it is vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Existing backdoor attack methods on LD exhibit limited effectiveness in dynamic real-world scenarios, primarily because they fail to consider dynamic scene factors, including changes in driving perspectives (e.g., viewpoint transformations) and environmental conditions (e.g., weather or lighting changes). To tackle this issue, this paper introduces BadLANE, a dynamic scene adaptation backdoor attack for LD designed to withstand changes in real-world dynamic scene factors. To address the challenges posed by changing driving perspectives, we propose an amorphous trigger pattern composed of shapeless pixels. This trigger design allows the backdoor to be activated by various forms or shapes of mud spots or pollution on the road or lens, enabling adaptation to changes in vehicle observation viewpoints during driving. To mitigate the effects of environmental changes, we design a meta-learning framework to train meta-generators tailored to different environmental conditions. These generators produce meta-triggers that incorporate diverse environmental information, such as weather or lighting conditions, as the initialization of the trigger patterns for backdoor implantation, thus enabling adaptation to dynamic environments. Extensive experiments on various commonly used LD models in both digital and physical domains validate the effectiveness of our attacks, outperforming other baselines significantly (+25.15% on average in Attack Success Rate). Our codes can be found in https://github.com/Veee9/BadLANE.

28 October 2024
Verified
Conference Paper
Open access
TZTianyuan Zhang
Tianyuan Zhang
LWLu Wang
Lu Wang
HLHainan Li
Hainan Li
YXYisong Xiao
Yisong Xiao
SLSiyuan Liang
Siyuan Liang
DTDacheng Tao
Dacheng Tao
Lane detection (LD) is an essential component of autonomous driving systems, providing fundamental functionalities like adaptive cruise control and automated lane centering. Existing LD benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating common cases, neglecting the robustness of LD models against environmental illusions such as shadows and tire marks on the road. This research gap poses significant safety challenges since these illusions exist naturally in real-world traffic situations. For the first time, this paper studies the potential threats caused by these environmental illusions to LD and establishes the first comprehensive benchmark LanEvil for evaluating the robustness of LD against this natural corruption. We systematically design 14 prevalent yet critical types of environmental illusions (e.g., shadow, reflection) that cover a wide spectrum of real-world influencing factors in LD tasks. Based on real-world environments, we create 94 realistic and customizable 3D cases using the widely used CARLA simulator, resulting in a dataset comprising 90,292 sampled images. Through extensive experiments, we benchmark the robustness of popular LD methods using LanEvil, revealing substantial performance degradation (-5.37% Accuracy and -10.70% F1-Score on average), with shadow effects posing the greatest risk (-7.39% Accuracy). Additionally, we assess the performance of commercial auto-driving systems OpenPilot and Apollo through collaborative simulations, demonstrating that proposed environmental illusions can lead to incorrect decisions and potential traffic accidents. To defend against environmental illusions, we propose the Attention Area Mixing (AAM) approach using hard examples, which witness significant robustness improvement (+3.76%) under illumination effects. We hope our paper can contribute to advancing more robust auto-driving systems in the future. Part of our dataset and demos can be found at the https://lanevil.github.io/.