Yu (Jennie) Zheng

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yu.zheng[at]uci.edu

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

Hi! I am an Associate Specialist at University of California, Berkeley. 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.

University of California, Berkeley Feb 2026 – Present

Associate Specialist

University of California, Irvine Sep 2024 – Feb 2026

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 Publications

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. Full List

Privacy-Preserving AI

EAGLE: Scalable Privacy-Preserving Graph-based Anomaly Detection with Practical Cross-silo Partitioning.
ACM SIGKDD Conference (KDD), 2027 (accepted).
Chenang Li, Yu Zheng, Tianyi Liu, Yupeng Zhang, and Zhou Li.
Convergent Privacy Framework for Multi-layer GNNs through Contractive Message Passing.[Code][Poster]
NDSS, 2026.
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

From Review to Authorization: Key-Isolated Threshold Signing for LLM Agents.
Beyond Private Training: The New Landscape of AI Privacy (NeurIPS InfPriv Workshop), 2026.
Yu Zheng, Qizhi Zhang.
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.

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

Professional Service

Organizing Committee:

Program Committee:

Session Chair/Host:

Review Service:

Miscellaneous