Hanrong Zhang (张涵容)

Hanrong Zhang (张涵容)

Hi, there! I’m a Ph.D. Student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, fortunate to be advised by Prof. Philip S. Yu. 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 also 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 Post-training; LLM Agent; Agentic Reinforcement Learning; LLM Reasoning;
  • Trustworthy ML: MLLM (Agent) Safety and Security; Self-supervised Learning security;
  • Machine Learning and Data Mining: ML for Industrial Fault Diagnosis, Anomaly/Out-of-Distribution Detection; ML for Healthcare;

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

🔥 News

📖 Educations

  • University of Illinois Chicago | Aug. 2025 –
    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] [code]

  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. 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, Medical Image Analysis Under Review)

  5. 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)

  6. 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)

  7. 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

  8. 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)

💻 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

💻 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)