About Me

I am a PhD student at the University of Queensland, working under the supervision of A/Prof. Guangdong Bai and Dr. Jason Xue. My research focuses on AI usage control: how to govern the way trained models and their training data can be reused, repurposed, or queried after release. My research is generously supported by the UQGSS and the CSIRO Top-up Scholarship. I was also awarded the 2024 Google PhD Fellowship. I serve as the HDR representative for the CSS discipline.

Recent Projects

Model Usage Control

Neuron-level Usage Control: CoreLocker@IEEE S&P
Adaptable Usage Control: AdaLoc@EuroS&P
Logit-level Model Modulation: AIM@WWW
Neural Network Verification: WRAACT@OOPSLA

Data Usage Control

Data privacy tracing: ATP@TDSC
Model-specific Authorization: Non-transferable Examples
Algorithmic Purpose Limitation: AlgoSpec@USENIX Security
Token-level Gradient Inversion: Grab@ACM CCS
Multi-modal Membership Inference: M⁴I@NeurIPS

News

[Apr. 2026] Our paper on data privacy tracing has been accepted to IEEE TDSC’26.
[Mar. 2026] Our paper on usage control has been accepted to IEEE EuroS&P’26.
[Feb. 2026] I will serve as a reviewer for ECCV’26, NeurIPS’26.
[Nov. 2025] I will serve as a PC member for USENIX Security AE’26.
[Nov. 2025] Our paper on GIA defense has been accepted to AsiaCCS’26.
[Sep. 2025] I will serve as a reviewer for ICLR’26 and CVPR’26.
[Aug. 2025] Our paper on NNV has been accepted to OOPSLA’25.
[Jul. 2025] I will serve as a PC member for ACM CCS LAMPS’25.
[Mar. 2025] I will serve as a reviewer for IEEE TDSC, IEEE TIFS, and TSC.
[Jan. 2025] Our paper on AI model modulation has been accepted to WWW’25.
[Oct. 2024] Awarded the Google PhD Fellowship!
[Oct. 2024] I will serve as a PC member for PAKDD’25.
[Aug. 2024] Our paper on GIA in language models has been accepted to ACM CCS’24.
[Mar. 2024] Our paper on AI model usage control has been accepted to IEEE S&P’24.
[Feb. 2024] Our paper on purpose limitation has been accepted to USENIX Security’24.

Older news (2022–2023)

[Dec. 2023] Our paper on deep data hiding has been accepted to IEEE TCSS.
[Oct. 2023] Our paper on knowledge distillation has been accepted to WACV’24.
[Aug. 2023] Our paper on formalizing LMs perturbation has been accepted to ICFEM’23.
[Dec. 2022] Graduated with a B.CS (Adv.) from the University of Adelaide (2020–22).
[Nov. 2022] Presented at my first conference, NeurIPS, in New Orleans!
[Sep. 2022] Our paper on multi-modal model MIA has been accepted to NeurIPS’22.

Selected Publications

S&P'24

CoreLocker: Neuron-level Usage Control

Zihan Wang, Zhongkui Ma, Xinguo Feng, Ruoxi Sun, Hu Wang, Minhui Xue, Guangdong Bai.

IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), Mar. 2024.

PDF Website

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wang2024corelocker,
  title={CoreLocker: Neuron-level Usage Control},
  author={Wang, Zihan and Ma, Zhongkui and Feng, Xinguo and Sun, Ruoxi and Wang, Hu and Xue, Minhui and Bai, Guangdong.},
  booktitle={IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S\&P)},
  doi = {10.1109/SP54263.2024.00182},
  url = {https://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/SP54263.2024.00182},
  pages={2497--2514},
  year={2024}
}

EuroS&P'26

Re-Key-Free, Risky-Free: Adaptable Model Usage Control

Zihan Wang, Zhongkui Ma, Xinguo Feng, Chuan Yan, Dongge Liu, Ruoxi Sun, Derui Wang, Minhui Xue, Guangdong Bai.

IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (Euro S&P), Jul. 2026.

PDF

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wang2025rekey,
  title={Re-Key-Free, Risky-Free: Adaptable Model Usage Control},
  author={Wang, Zihan and Ma, Zhongkui and Feng, Xinguo and Yan, Chuan and Liu, Dongge and Sun, Ruoxi and Wang, Derui and Xue, Minhui and Bai, Guangdong},
  booktitle={Proc. of Euro S\&P},
  year={2026}
}

Preprint'25

Catch-Only-One: Non-Transferable Examples for Model-Specific Authorization

Zihan Wang, Zhiyong (Ethan) Ma, Zhongkui Ma, Shuofeng Liu, Akide Liu, Derui Wang, Minhui Xue, Guangdong Bai.

PDF

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wang2025nontransfer,
  title={Catch-Only-One: Non-Transferable Examples for Model-Specific Authorization},
  author={Wang, Zihan and Ma, Ethan and Ma, Zhongkui and Liu, Shuofeng and Liu, Akide and Wang, Derui and Xue, Minhui and Bai, Guangdong},
  booktitle={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.10982},
  year={2025}
}

WWW'25

AI Model Modulation with Logits Redistribution

Zihan Wang, Zhongkui Ma, Xinguo Feng, Zhiyang Mei, Zhiyong Ma, Derui Wang, Minhui Xue, Guangdong Bai.

The Web Conference (WWW), Apr. 2025.

PDF

BibTeX

@inproceedings{wang2025aim,
  title={AI Model Modulation with Logits Redistribution},
  author={Wang, Zihan and Ma, Zhongkui and Feng, Xinguo and Mei, Zhiyang and Ma, Zhiyong and Wang, Derui and Wang, Hu and Xue, Minhui and Bai, Guangdong.},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3696410.3714737},
  doi = {10.1145/3696410.3714737},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2025},
  location = {Sydney, Australia},
  series = {WWW'25}
}

OOPSLA'25
Convex Hull Approximation for Activation Functions

Zhongkui Ma^†, Zihan Wang^†, Guangdong Bai.

The ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA), Oct. 2025.
PDF
BibTeX

@inproceedings{}

TCSS

Data Hiding With Deep Learning: A Survey Unifying Digital Watermarking and Steganography

Zihan Wang, Olivia Byrnes, Hu Wang, Ruoxi Sun, Congbo Ma, Huaming Chen, Qi Wu, Minhui Xue.

IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (TCSS), Dec. 2023.

PDF

BibTeX

@article{wang2023data,
  title={Data hiding with deep learning: a survey unifying digital watermarking and steganography},
  author={Wang, Zihan and Byrnes, Olivia and Wang, Hu and Sun, Ruoxi and Ma, Congbo and Chen, Huaming and Wu, Qi and Xue, Minhui},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems},
  year={2023},
  publisher={IEEE}
}

NeurIPS'22

M⁴I: Multi-modal Models Membership Inference

Pingyi Hu^†, Zihan Wang^†, Ruoxi Sun, Hu Wang, Minhui Xue.

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Sep. 2022.

PDF

BibTeX

@inproceedings{hu2022m,
  title={M $\^{} 4$ I: Multi-modal Models Membership Inference},
  author={Hu, Pingyi and Wang, Zihan and Sun, Ruoxi and Wang, Hu and Xue, Minhui},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume={35},
  pages={1867--1882},
  year={2022}
}

USENIX'24

Being Transparent is Merely the Beginning: Enforcing Purpose Limitation with Polynomial Approximation

Shuofeng Liu, Zihan Wang, Minhui Xue, Long Wang, Yuanchao Zhang, Guangdong Bai.

USENIX Security, Feb. 2024.

PDF

BibTeX

@inproceedings{liu2024purpose,
  title={Being Transparent is Merely the Beginning: Enforcing Purpose Limitation with Polynomial Approximation},
  author={Liu, Shuofeng and Wang, Zihan and Xue, Minhui and Wang, Long and Zhang, Yuanchao and Bai, Guangdong.},
  journal={USENIX Security},
  year={2024}
}

CCS'24
Uncovering Gradient Inversion Risks in Practical Language Model Training

Xinguo Feng, Zhongkui Ma, Zihan Wang, Chegne Eu Joe, Mengyao Ma, Alsharif Abuadbba, Guangdong Bai.

ACM Computer and Communications Security Conference (CCS), Aug. 2024.
PDF
BibTeX

@inproceedings{ }

WACV'24

BPKD: Boundary Privileged Knowledge Distillation For Semantic Segmentation

Liyang Liu, Zihan Wang, Minh Hieu Phan, Bowen Zhang, Jinchao Ge, Yifan Liu.

IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), Oct. 2023.

PDF

BibTeX

@inproceedings{liu2024bpkd,
  title={BPKD: Boundary Privileged Knowledge Distillation For Semantic Segmentation},
  author={Liu, Liyang and Wang, Zihan and Phan, Minh Hieu and Zhang, Bowen and Ge, Jinchao and Liu, Yifan},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision},
  pages={1062--1072},
  year={2024}
}