Yifan Liao (廖一凡)

I'm a Ph.D. student at HKUST (Guangzhou), supervised by Prof. Xinlei He.

Previously, I worked as a research assistant for one year at the NUS Research Institute in Chongqing, under the supervision of Prof. Zhiyong Huang.

I obtained my M.Comp. in Artificial Intelligence at National University of Singapore (NUS), where I worked closely with Prof. Yun Lin and Prof. Jinsong Dong on my master dissertation project. Before joining NUS, I received my B.Eng. in Mechanical Engineering at Chongqing University (CQU).

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Leading Research

I'm interested in AI4testing and Autonomous Driving testing. Most of my research is about detecting the anomalies targeting agents. Some projects are highlighted.

This project detects and explains attack-induced anomalies in web applications by learning normal behavior at runtime using first-order logic constraints and LLM-assisted script synthesis.

We expose and evaluate backdoor vulnerabilities in lane detection via diffusion-based naturalistic data poisoning, using gradient-informed trigger placement and structure/scene-consistency losses for stealthy, effective attacks.