Zhiyi Liu | University of Science and Technology of China

About me

Hi, I’m Zhiyi, a second-year M.E. student at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), supervised by Prof. Haisheng Tan and Prof. Haohua Du. Previously, I was an undergraduate student at the School of Cyber Science and Technology, Beihang University (BUAA), advised by Prof. Haohua Du and Prof. Yanqing Yao.

Currently, I’m fortunate to be collaborating with Dr. Xiaojun Jia (NTU) as a research intern.

I'm seeking a PhD position for 2028 Fall and actively seeking on-site/remote research internship opportunities.

Research Interests

I am deeply motivated to contribute to LLM and Agent safety research, particularly in developing robust methods to detect and mitigate jailbreaks, prompt injection, and reasoning failures.

News

[August. 2026] WassSteer, my first paper about LLM Safety, has been accepted to EMNLP 2026 main conference!
[April. 2025] Our paper on social network defense has been accepted to IWQoS 2025!
[March. 2025] Our paper on attribute-based encryption (ABE) has been accepted for publication in FCS!
[November. 2024] I was awarded the National Scholarship!
[August. 2024] I gave an oral presentation on our federated learning paper.
[November. 2023] Our work on attribute-based encryption won Second Prize in the National Cryptography Competition.

Selected Publications [Google Scholar][DBLP]

EMNLP

Fine-Grained Selective Refusal: Steering LLM Safety via Wasserstein-Informed Flow Matching

Zhiyi Liu, Haohua Du*, Haoqi Sun, and Haisheng Tan

Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2026.

PDF CCF-B Conference, October 2026, Budapest, Hungary

Submitted to AAAI'27

HALO: Hyperspherical Information Geometry for LLM Self-Evaluation

Zhiyi Liu, Haoqi Sun, Haohua Du*, Zhiqiang Wang, and Haisheng Tan*

IWQoS

Sedative: Pacify the Online Social Networks under Hijacking-based Troll Attacks

Wen Ma, Zhiyi Liu, Haohua Du*, and Xiaoyu Liang

IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS), 2025.

PDF Slides CCF-B Conference, July 2025, Gold Coast, Australia

FCS

Traceable and revocable multi-authority ABE supporting decryption outsourcing and policy update for cloud data access control

Yanqing Yao*, Yunjia Zhang, Zhiyi Liu, Yuxuan Wang, Xinyu Tan, and Zhengde Zhai

Frontiers of Computer Science (FCS), 2026.

PDF Code CCF-B Journal

Education

University of Science and Technology of China (USTC)
- M.E. in Artifical Intelligence, September. 2025 - June. 2028 (expected)
- Advisor: Prof. Haisheng Tan and Prof. Haohua Du
Beihang University (BUAA)
- B.E. in CyberSpace Security, September. 2021 - June. 2025
- Advisor:
  - Prof. Haohua Du (Oct. 2023 - Now) and Prof. Yanqing Yao (Jun. 2023 - Dec. 2023)

Awards

Sep. 2025,2026 First Prize of Academic Scholarship, USTC
May. 2025 Outstanding Graduate of Beihang University, Beihang University
Oct. 2024 National Scholarship, Ministry of Education, China (top 0.2% in China)
Nov. 2024 Special Prize of Academic Scholarship, Beihang University
Sep. 2023,2024 Merit Student, Beihang University
Nov. 2023 Second Prize in the National Cryptography Competition (as Capitan), Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research (CACR)

Contact

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me. Email: liu.zhiyi@mail.ustc.edu.cn

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