About Me

I am currently a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), working with Prof. Wei Yang Bryan Lim and Prof. Cyril Leung in MIDORI Lab. Before this, I received my Ph.D. degree in 2025 from the School of Cyberspace Science and Technology at Beijing Jiaotong University, supervised by Prof. Jiqiang Liu and Prof. Wei Wang. From 2024 to 2025, I was a visiting student at NTU.


My research mainly focuses on Trustworthy AI, with a particular focus on poisoning attacks and defence mechanisms in distributed deep learning systems. Recently, my research has shifted toward trustworthiness in Multimodal LLM and Agent, where I explore potential vulnerabilities and develop robust defence mechanisms to enhance their integrity and user trust.

News

  • Sep 2026🎉 Our work is accepted by NDSS 2027!
  • Sep 2026🎉 Two papers are accepted by NeurIPS 2026!
  • Sep 2026🎉 Our work is accepted by IEEE TDSC!
  • Jun 2026🎉 Awarded the BJTU Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation!
  • Jun 2026🎉 Our work is accepted by ECCV 2026!
  • May 2026🎉 Four papers are accepted by ICML 2026!
  • Mar 2026🎉 Our work is accepted by WWW 2026!
  • Dec 2025🎉 Our work is accepted by NeurIPS 2025!
  • Oct 2024🎉 Our work is accepted by IEEE TIFS!
  • Jul 2024🎉 Our work is accepted by ACM CCS 2024!

Selected Publications [Full List >>] [Google Scholar] [DBLP]

† Corresponding author (for publications)
VirusCascade thumbnail

VirusCascade: Hijacking Collaborative Reflection in LLM-Powered Recommender Agents

Yurong Hao†, Wen Zhou, Guowei Guan, Tiantong Wu, Fuyao Zhang, Wei Yang Bryan Lim.

NDSS 2027Oral
# Agentic Recommender Systems # Memory Poisoning Attack
C3H thumbnail

C3H: Compression-to-Consensus Criteria Hijacking in Multimodal LLM Recommender Systems

Guowei Guan, Yurong Hao†, Jiaming Zhang, Fuyao Zhang, Wei Yang Bryan Lim.

NeurIPS 2026
# Criteria Hijacking # MLLM-based Recommender Systems
WURI thumbnail

WURI: Watching Unfolding Risk in Agent Interactions

Yiyang Duan, Tiantong Wu, Yurong Hao†, Wei Yang Bryan Lim.

NeurIPS 2026
# Trajectory monitoring # Agent Security
VenomRec thumbnail

VenomRec: Cross-Modal Interactive Poisoning for Targeted Promotion in Multimodal LLM Recommender Systems

Guowei Guan, Yurong Hao†, Jiaming Zhang, Tiantong Wu, Fuyao Zhang, Tianxiang Chen, Longtao Huang, Cyril Leung, Wei Yang Bryan Lim.

ICML 2026
# Cross-Modal Poisoning Attack # MLLM-based Recommender Systems
FRecAttack2 thumbnail

Not One Less: Exploring Interplay between User Profiles and Items in Untargeted Attacks against Federated Recommendation

Yurong Hao, Xihui Chen, Xiaoting Lyu, Jiqiang Liu, Yongsheng Zhu, Zhiguo Wan, Sjouke Mauw, Wei Wang.

ACM CCS 2024 Oral
# Untargeted Poisoning Attacks # Untargeted Defence
More Research

Patents & Monographs

  • Local Differential Privacy Method for Government Data Sharing. CN112329056B. China Patent Assigned
  • Method for Privacy Leak detection method For Vertical Federated Learning Based on Feature Embedding Analysis. CN116341004B. China Patent Granted
  • Defence Method for Federated Learning Poisoning Attacks. CN116527393A. China Patent Granted
  • Privacy-Preserving Method for POI Recommendation. CN117272370B. China Patent Granted
  • Privacy Preserving Computation[M], People's Posts and Telecommunications Press, 2023. Contributed to the writing of Section 8 (Differential Privacy)
  • Artificial Intelligence Security Assessment Technology[M], Hans Publishing House, 2023. Served as an Editorial Board Member

Research Projects

  • Privacy Preserving Recommender System, Ant Group. PI
  • Privacy Preserved Methods for Federated Recommendation, Central Universities Basic Scientific Research Business Fund Project. PI
  • Privacy Preserved Methods for Government Data Sharing, Provincial Innovation Project. PI
  • Artificial Intelligence System Security Testing and Robust Enhancement Software and Hardware Integration, National Major Project. Participated in Project Application, Management and Tech Research
  • Research on key technologies for security detection and protection of artificial intelligence applications, National Major Project. Participated in Technology Research and Development
  • Trustworthy Mechanism and Key Technologies of Urban Intelligent Systems, National Key R&D Program Project. Participated in Technology Research and Development

Invited Talks

  • Nov 2025Security and Privacy in Personalised AI: From Federated to Multimodal LLM-based Recommender Systems, Institute of Science Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
  • Oct 2024Not One Less: Exploring Interplay between User Profiles and Items in Untargeted Attacks against Federated Recommendation, ACM CCS 2024 Oral, Salt Lake City, The United States.
  • Sep 2024Trustworthy AI-poisoning Attacks & Defence, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.