Hi, there! I’m Hanrong Zhang (张涵容), a Ph.D. Student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, fortunate to be advised by Prof. Philip S. Yu (IEEE/ACM Fellow). Prior to this, I received my MEng degree in Computer Engineering from Zhejiang University. I was also a research scientist intern at Alibaba Group. I work closely with Prof. Yongfeng Zhang at Rutgers University and Prof. Shiqing Ma at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

My research interests lie in:

• Large Language Model: LLM Agent; Reinforcement Learning; LLM Reasoning; LLM Post-training;
• Trustworthy AI: LLM (Agent) Safety and Security;
• Machine Learning and Data Mining: ML for Industrial Fault Diagnosis, Self-supervised Learning

If you are interested in academic collaboration or discussion, please feel free to contact me zhanghr0709 [AT] gmail.com.

📢 I am actively looking for research internships for Summer 2026. Feel free to reach out if you think I am a good fit!

🔥 News

• 2025.09:  🎉🎉 Invited as a reviewer for ICLR, CVPR, Pattern Recognition and IEEE Trans. on Reliability.
• 2025.08:  🎉🎉 I will be starting my CS Ph.D. in BDSC Lab at the University of Illinois Chicago, under the supervision of Prof. Philip S. Yu.
• 2025.04:  🎉🎉 Give a talk at Xtra Computing Group of Prof. Bingsheng He at School of Computing, NUS.
• 2025.03:  🎉🎉 I’ve been awarded the Outstanding Graduate in Zhejiang Province and Outstanding Graduate at Zhejiang University.
• 2025.02:  🎉🎉 Invisible Backdoor Attack in Self-supervised Learning (First author) is accepted by CVPR 2025.
• 2025.01:  🎉🎉 Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents (First author) is accepted by ICLR 2025.
• 2025.01:  🎉🎉 Class Incremental Fault Diagnosis under Limited Fault Data via Supervised Contrastive Knowledge Distillation (First author) is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.
• 2024.11:  🎉🎉 I’ve been awarded the National Scholarship for Graduate Students at Zhejiang University.
• 2024.04:  🎉🎉 Generalized Out-of-distribution Fault Diagnosis (GOOFD) via Internal Contrastive Learning (Co-first author) is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics.
• 2023.11:  🎉🎉 I’ve been awarded the National Scholarship for Graduate Students at Zhejiang University.

📖 Educations

• University of Illinois Chicago | Aug. 2025 – Present
  Ph.D. Computer Science, USA
  Supervisor: Prof. Philip S. Yu

• Zhejiang University | Sep. 2022 – Mar. 2025
  MEng. Computer Engineering, China
  Ranking: 1/82; Supervisor: Prof. Hongwei Wang

• University of Leeds (QS 75) | Sep. 2018 – Jun. 2022
  BSc. Computer Science - Honors First Class Degree, United Kingdom

• Southwest Jiaotong University | Sep. 2018 – Jun. 2022
  BEng. Computer Science and Technology, China
  Ranking: 1/75; Supervisor: Prof. Tianrui Li

📝 Publications

* denotes Equal Contribution

Trustworthy ML:

1. Agent Security Bench (ASB): Formalizing and Benchmarking Attacks and Defenses in LLM-based Agents
   Hanrong Zhang, Jingyuan Huang, Kai Mei, Yifei Yao, Zhenting Wang, Chenlu Zhan, Hongwei Wang, Yongfeng Zhang
   Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. [arxiv] [code] [website]

2. Invisible Backdoor Attack in Self-supervised Learning
   Hanrong Zhang*, Zhenting Wang*, Tingxu Han, Mingyu Jin, Chenlu Zhan, Mengnan Du, Hongwei Wang, Shiqing Ma
   Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2025. [arxiv] [code]

Machine Learning and Data Mining:

1. Class Incremental Fault Diagnosis under Limited Fault Data via Supervised Contrastive Knowledge Distillation
   Hanrong Zhang, Yifei Yao, Zixuan Wang, Jiayuan Su, Mengxuan Li, Peng Peng, Hongwei Wang
   IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (IF=12.3, JCR Q1 SCI) [arxiv]

2. Generalized Out-of-distribution Fault Diagnosis (GOOFD) via Internal Contrastive Learning
   Xingyue Wang*, Hanrong Zhang*, Xinlong Qiao, Ke Ma, Shuting Tao, Peng Peng, Hongwei Wang
   IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (IF=12.3, JCR Q1 SCI)

3. Imbalanced Chemical Process Fault Diagnosis Using Balancing GAN With Active Sample Selection
   Peng Peng*, Hanrong Zhang*, Xinyue Wang, Wanqiu Huang, Hongwei Wang
   IEEE Sensors Journal (IF=4.3, JCR Q1 SCI)

4. SAKA: an intelligent platform for semi-automated knowledge graph construction and application
   Hanrong Zhang, Xinyue Wang, Jiabao Pan, Hongwei Wang
   Service Oriented Computing and Applications

5. An Intelligent System for Semantic Information Extraction and Knowledge Graph Construction from Multi-Type Data Sources
   Hanrong Zhang, Xinyue Wang, Bo Qin, Hongwei Wang
   IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (ICEBE 2022)

6. Multi-gate Mixture-of-Expert Combined with Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique for Multimode Imbalanced Fault Diagnosis
   Wanqiu Huang, Hanrong Zhang, Peng Peng, Hongwei Wang
   International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (IEEE CSCWD 2023, Best Paper Award Finalist)

7. Debiasing Medical Visual Question Answering via Counterfactual Training
   Chenlu Zhan*, Peng Peng*, Hanrong Zhang, Haiyue Sun, Chunnan Shang, Tao Chen, Hongsen Wang, Gaoang Wang, Hongwei Wang
   International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer-Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2023)

8. Industrial Data Synthesis Framework for Fault Diagnosis Using Diffusion and Flow-Based Models
   Shuting Tao, Xiangming Meng, Hanrong Zhang, Hongwei Wang
   International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (IEEE CSCWD 2025)

Preprint:

1. From Uncertainty to Clarity: Uncertainty-Guided Class-Incremental Learning for Limited Biomedical Samples via Semantic Expansion
   Yifei Yao*, Hanrong Zhang*, Hongwei Wang, Ying Chi (preprint, Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics Under Review)

💻 Internships

• Research Scientist Intern, Alibaba Group, 2025.05 - 2025.08

🎖 Honors and Awards

Scholarships

• National Scholarship for Graduate Students (Top 0.2%), ZJU, 2023 - 2024
• National Scholarship for Graduate Students (Top 0.2%), ZJU, 2022 - 2023
• First-class full-ride Scholarship (1/75, ￥62000), UoL, 2020 - 2021
• National Scholarship for Undergraduate Students (Top 0.2%), SWJTU, 2019 - 2020
• Second-class Scholarship (3/75, ￥25000), UoL, 2018 - 2019

Academic Awards

• Outstanding Graduate in Zhejiang Province, ZJU, 2025
• Outstanding Graduate at Zhejiang University, ZJU, 2025
• Award of Honor for Graduate, ZJU, 2022 - 2023, 2023 - 2024
• Graduate with Merit A Performance, ZJU, 2022 - 2023
• Provincial Outstanding Graduate, SWJTU, 2022
• Best Student in Computer Science (1/75), UoL, 2020 - 2021
• Best Student Overall (1/300, 4 majors), UoL, 2018 - 2019
• Pacemaker to Merit Student (Top 1%), SWJTU, 2018 - 2019 & 2019 - 2020 & 2020 - 2021

Competition Awards

• Mathematical Modeling Contest for College Students, National Second Prize (Top 0.5% of 45,000 teams), Sep. 2020
• Students Service Outsourcing Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, National Second Prize (Top 3%), Aug. 2020
• MathorCup College Mathematical Modeling Competition, First Prize (Top 3%), May 2020
• May Day Mathematical Modeling Competition, First Prize (Top 3%), May 2020
• Asia-Pacific Mathematical Modeling Contest, First Prize (Top 3%), Nov. 2019
• Mathematical Modeling Competition in Southwest Jiaotong University, First Prize (Top 3%), Nov. 2019

📝 Academic Service

Conference Reviewer

• Reviewer, ICLR
• Reviewer, CVPR

Journal Reviewer

• Reviewer, Pattern Recognition
• Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Reliability
• Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

💻 Teachings

• Teaching Assistant, ECE 448: Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang University and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (with Prof. Mark Hasegawa-Johnson), Spring 2023 and Spring 2024 (for undergraduates)
• Teaching Assistant, ECE 2013: Artificial Intelligence, Zhejiang University, Fall 2023 (for graduates)