Biography | Selected Publication | Teaching & Mentoring | Service | Misc

I am on job market in 2025-2026 round!!! Thanks for reaching out to me!!!

Hi! I am a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at University of California, Irvine (UCI) advised by Prof. Zhou Li. My research interests focus on privacy-preserving AI, LLM privacy & security, and secure computation. If you are interested into my research, I am glad to share or collaborate.

• [NEWS|Nov 2025] I am excited to attend “NSF SaTC Aspiring PI Workshop”! See you at Washington, D.C. in December.
• [NEWS|Oct 2025] Invited to serve as Program Commitee of CCS 2026 and Publicity Chair of PRISM Workshop co-located with NDSS 2026!
• [NEWS|Sep 2025] Our paper “Entente: Cross-silo Intrusion Detection on Network Log Graphs with Federated Learning” has been accepted at NDSS 2026!

University of California, Irvine (UCI) Sep 2024 – Present

Postdoctoral Scholar

Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong (CUHK) Aug 2018 – Jul 2024

Department of Information Engineering · PhD

Thesis: Communication-efficient protocols for secure training.

Morse Team, Ant Group & Alibaba Group May 2022 – Sep 2022

Applied Research Intern - Algorithm, Full-time.

Trustworthy Theory and Engineering Lab, 2012 Labs Sep 2020 - Nov 2020

Applied Research Intern - Security and Privacy, Full-time.

Northeastern University (NEU) Oct 2014 – Jun 2018

Department of Communication Engineering · BEng
Ranking: 1st of 96.

National University of Singapore Jul 2018 - Aug 2018

Summer School Undergraduate, Full-time.

Chinese University of Hong Kong Mar 2018 - May 2018

Research Assistant, Full-time.

Selected Publication

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My research is situated at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), with the overarching goal of enabling efficient and privacy-preserving real-world applications. I advance PETs, including multiparty computation (MPC), differential privacy (DP), and federated learning (FL). Building on my contributions to the theory and design of PETs, I advance PPAI real-world deployments by developing theoretically sound and practically deployable PETs solutions. My work has been classified as privacy-preserving AI, LLM privacy & security, and secure computation. My long-term vision is to pioneer foundational PPAI methodologies and build scalable PPAI systems with real-world impact.

Privacy-Preserving AI

Convergent Privacy Framework with Contractive GNN layers for Multi-hop Aggregations.[Code]
Major Revision.
Yu Zheng , Chenang Li, Zhou Li, and Qingsong Wang.

Secure Graph Convolutional Network on Vertically Split Data from Sparse Matrix Decomposition.[Code]
Prelim version accepted in DLSP Workshop @IEEE S&P, 2025.
Yu Zheng, Qizhi Zhang, Chenang Li, Lichun Li, Kai Zhou, and Shan Yin.

Entente: Cross-silo Intrusion Detection on Network Log Graphs with Federated Learning.[Code]
NDSS, 2026.
Jiacen Xu, Chenang Li, Yu Zheng, and Zhou Li.

FedFed: Feature Distillation against Data Heterogeneity in Federated Learning.[Code]
NeurIPS, 2023.
Zhiqin Yang, Yonggang Zhang, Yu Zheng, Xinmei Tian, Hao Peng, Tongliang Liu, and Bo Han.

Secure Softmax/Sigmoid for Machine-Learning Computation.[Code]
ACSAC, 2023.
Yu Zheng, Qizhi Zhang, Sherman S.M. Chow, Yuxiang Peng, Sijun Tan, Lichun Li, and Shan Yin.

LLM Privacy & Security [current focus]

From Alerts to Intelligence: A Novel LLM-Aided Framework for Host-based Intrusion Detection.
arXiv, 2025.
Danyu Sun, Jinghuai Zhang, Jiacen Xu, Yu Zheng, Yuan Tian, and Zhou Li.

Secure Computation

DISCO: Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Constant State.[Code]
AsiaCCS, 2024.
Xiangfu Song, Yu Zheng, Jianli Bai, Changyu Dong, Zheli Liu, and Ee-Chien Chang.

Encrypted Video Search: Scalable, Modular, and Content-similar.[Code]
MMSys, 2022. (Best Student Paper Award)
Yu Zheng, Heng Tian, Minxin Du, and Chong Fu.

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Teaching & Mentoring

During my PhD, I have also had the opportunity to mentor the fantastic undergraduate and master’s students on their theses and research projects.

Chenang Li (Oct 2024 - Present: PhD Student @UCI –>

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Professional Service

Organizing Committee:

• (26’ ): Publicity Chair for PRISM Workshop co-located with NDSS (San Diego).

Program Committee:

• (26’ ): ACM CCS.
• (25’ ): ACSAC, AAAI, ACNS-SiMLA, ACM WPES@CCS, ICNC.
• (24’ ): CCS AE, NDSS AE (Discussion Lead), TheWebConf AE, USENIX Security AE, EAI ICECI.
• (23’ ): CCS AE, AJCAI.

Session Chair/Host:

• (25’ ): S&P (San Francisco), RSA (San Francisco), NDSS (San Diego).
• (24’ ): AsiaCCS (Singapore).

Review Service:

• (26’ ) ICLR.
• (25’ ) ACM TOPS, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, TMLR, TDSC.
• (24’ ) AISTATS, AsiaCCS, ICLR, ICML, IEEE TDSC, Information Sciences, NeurIPS.
• (23’ ) Information Sciences, NCAA, NeurIPS, JMANS.

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Miscellaneous

Outside of research, I enjoy reading, fitness, dance, and cooking.