Shenao Yan 闫申奥

Hi! I am a Ph.D. student of University of Connecticut, advised by Prof. Yuan Hong. Prior to my Ph.D. career, I received my master’s degree from School of Computer Science, Rutgers University in 2022.

Research Interests

Currently, my research centers on Trustworthy Machine Learning, especially safe and responsible LLM.

I am always looking for related collaboration. If you are interested to chat with me, feel free to drop me an email.

News

[2025-02] One paper got accepted to CODASPY ‘25.
[2024-07] I received the USENIX Security ‘24 Student Grant. Thanks for the generous support!
[2024-06] One paper got accepted to USENIX Security ‘24.
[2024-05] I’m awarded the Synchrony Fellowship for Fall 2024.
[2024-05] I’m awarded the 2024 Predoctoral Reward.
[2024-05] I passed the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam.
[2023-09] GO Huskies!
[2022-07] I started as a software engineer intern at Meta, Instagram Fairness & Equity Group.

Publications

Shenao Yan, Shen Wang, Yue Duan, Hanbin Hong, Kiho Lee, Doowon Kim, Yuan Hong "An LLM-Assisted Easy-to-Trigger Backdoor Attack on Code Completion Models: Injecting Disguised Vulnerabilities against Strong Detection". In 33rd USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security ‘24). [Paper] [github] [media]

Shenao Yan, Guanhong Tao, Xuwei Liu, Juan Zhai, Shiqing Ma, Lei Xu, Xiangyu Zhang "Correlations between deep neural network model coverage criteria and model quality". In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. [Paper] [github]

Hailun Ding, Shenao Yan, Juan Zhai, Shiqing Ma "ELISE: A Storage Efficient Logging System Powered by Redundancy Reduction and Representation Learning". In 30th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security ‘21). [Paper] [github]

Experience

Software Engineer Intern (Machine Learning) - Meta
- Time: Jun. 2022 - Sep. 2022
- Instagram Fairness & Equity, supervised by Dr. Bowen Yu.

Services

Program Committee for Conferences and Workshops

Reviewer, Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023, 2024
Reviewer, The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025
Reviewer, SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD), 2025
Program Committee Member/Reviewer, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2024
Artifact Evaluation Committee Member/Reviewer, The 31th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2024)
Artifact Evaluation Committee Member/Reviewer, The 34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security ‘25)
Sub-reviewer for ICLR 2024; WWW 2024, 2025; CCS 2024, 2025; NDSS 2025; USENIX 2025; RAID 2024; CVPR 2025

Journal Reviewer

IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS)
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (T-ITS)
Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence (EAAI)
Neural Networks
Applied Intelligence (APIN)
ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS)

Misc

I’m a fan of photography. Welcome to my blog.