Ziqi Zhang (张子祺)

Ziqi Zhang (张子祺)

Postdoc @ UIUC

Ziqi Zhang 张子祺

I’m Ziqi Zhang (pronounced as /tzi’chi chang/). I will join the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University (PSU) as an Assistant Professor. My research interests span AI security, trusted hardware, and software security. I have published several papers at top-tier conferences in various domains, including computer security, software engineering, AI, and ubiquitous computing. Recently, I’ve been working on the following topics:

  1. TEE-based LLM Protection [S&P’24, ICML’24, TOSEM’25, NeurIPS’25b]
  2. Secure AI platform: federated learning [ICSE’23, Ubicomp’22, WWW’23], authentication [Security’24], adversarial defense [S&P’25]
  3. Cybersecurity agent [NeurIPS’25a]

I was a Postdoc Researcher at UIUC working with Lingming Zhang. I received my Ph.D degree in the School of Computer Science from Peking University in 2023, advised by Prof. Ding Li, Prof. Yao Guo, and Prof. Xiangqun Chen. Before that, I earned my bachelor’s degree from the School of EECS, Peking University in 2018.

News

  • 05/2026: Two papers accepted by USENIX Security’26

Selected Publications

  • [USENIX Security’25] Pengli Wang, Bingyou Dong, Yifeng Cai, Zheng Zhang, Junlin Liu, Huanran Xue, Ye Wu, Yao Zhang, and Ziqi Zhang. “Game of Arrows: On the (In-)Security of Weight Obfuscation for On-Device TEE-Shielded LLM Partition Algorithms”. [paper]
  • [TOSEM’25] Ding Li, Ziqi Zhang, Mengyu Yao, Yifeng Cai, Yao Guo, and Xiangqun Chen. “TEESlice: Protecting Sensitive Neural Network Models in Trusted Execution Environments When Attackers have Pre-Trained Models”. [paper]
  • [S&P’24] Ziqi Zhang, Chen Gong, Yuanyuan Yuan, Yifeng Cai, Bingyan Liu, Ding Li, Yao Guo, Xiangqun Chen. “No Privacy Left Outside: On the (In-)Security of TEE-Shielded DNN Partition Defenses”. [paper] [artifact] [tool]
  • [ICSE’23] Ziqi Zhang, Yuanchun Li, Bingyan Liu, Yifeng Cai, Ding Li, Yao Guo, Xiangqun Chen. “FedSlice: Protecting Federated Learning Models from Malicious Participants with Model Slicing”. [paper] [code]
  • [ICSE’22] Ziqi Zhang, Yuanchun Li, Jindong Wang, Bingyan Liu, Ding Li, Xiangqun Chen, Yao Guo, Yunxin Liu. “ReMoS: Reducing Defect Inheritance in Transfer Learning via Relevant Model Slicing”. [paper] [code]
  • [ESEC/FSE’20] Ziqi Zhang, Yuanchun Li, Yao Guo, Xiangqun Chen, Yunxin Liu. “Dynamic Slicing for Deep Neural Networks.” [paper]

For a complete and up-to-date publication list, please see the Publications page.

Academic Services

  • Program Committee
    • IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), 2024, 2025, 2026
    • ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), 2025, 2026
    • IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering
    • International Workshop on Large Language Models for Code (LLM4Code), 2024, 2025
  • Conference Reviewer
    • The Web Conference (WWW), 2024, 2025
  • Journal Reviewer
    • IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2023, 2025, 2026
    • IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering (TSE), 2024, 2025
    • IEEE Transaction on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2025

Honors and Awards

  1. Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award of Peking University, Jun 2023
  2. Outstanding Graduate Award of Peking University, Jun 2023
  3. Merit Student of Peking University, Sep 2022
  4. Jiukun Scholarship, Peking University, Sep 2022
  5. Stars of Tomorrow Internship Program, Microsoft Research Asia, Sep 2020
  6. Intel Scholarship, Intel, Dec 2019

Misc

After work, I enjoy playing basketball and working out at the gym. I was a member of the men’s basketball teams for the EECS (for nine years) and CS (for two years) departments at Peking University. I served as the captain and coach of both teams. I was also a member of Peking University’s second-tier men’s basketball team. Currently, I play for Gyzers, the oldest Chinese basketball team at UIUC.