Welcome! I am currently a PhD student in Computer Engineering at the University of Houston. My primary research interests focus on IoT Security and AI/ML Security.

📖 Educations

• 2024.08 - Present, Ph.D. student, Electrical & Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston.

  • Advisors: Miao Pan

• 2021.09 - 2024.06, Master, School of Computer Science and Engineering, UESTC, Chengdu.

  • Co-advisors: Xiong Li and Weina Niu

• 2017.09 - 2021.06, Bachelor, School of Computer Science and Technology, Xidian University, Xi’an.

📝 Selected Publications

• Arxiv Preprint Black-box Audio Watermark Removal via Diffusion Priors, Lingfeng Yao, Xincong Zhong, Chenpei Huang, Xuandong Zhao, Hanqing Guo, Aohan Li, Jiang Liu, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Miao Pan

  Arxiv Preprint, 2026. [Paper] [Demo] [Code]

• Arxiv Preprint SpeechVerifier: Robust Acoustic Fingerprint against Tampering Attacks via Watermarking, Lingfeng Yao, Chenpei Huang, Shengyao Wang, Junpei Xue, Hanqing Guo, Jiang Liu, Xun Chen, Miao Pan

  Arxiv Preprint, 2025. [Paper] [Demo] [Code]

• AAAI 2026 Yours or Mine? Overwriting Attacks Against Neural Audio Watermarking, Lingfeng Yao, Chenpei Huang, Shengyao Wang, Junpei Xue, Hanqing Guo, Jiang Liu, Phone Lin, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Miao Pan

  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026. [Paper]

• AAAI 2026 iSeal: Encrypted Fingerprinting for Reliable LLM Ownership Verification, Zixun Xiong, Gaoyi Wu, Qingyang Yu, Mingyu Derek Ma, Lingfeng Yao, Miao Pan, Xiaojiang Du, Hao Wang

  AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026. [Paper] [Code]

• Arxiv Preprint Who’s Wearing? Ear Canal Biometric Key Extraction for User Authentication on Wireless Earbuds, Chenpei Huang, Lingfeng Yao, Hui Zhong, Kyu In Lee, Lan Zhang, Xiaoyong Yuan, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Miao Pan

  Arxiv Preprint, 2025. [Paper] [Demo]

• ICC 2024 A Robust Malicious Traffic Detection Framework with Low-quality Labeled Data, Lingfeng Yao, Weina Niu, Qingjun Yuan, Beibei Li, Yanfeng Zhang, Xiaosong Zhang

  IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2024. [Paper]

• Applied Intelligence Model-Agnostic Generation-Enhanced Technology for Few-Shot Intrusion Detection in IoT, Junpeng He, Lingfeng Yao, Muhammad Khurram Khan, Xiong Li, Weina Niu, Xiaosong Zhang, Fagen Li

  Applied Intelligence, 2024. [Paper]

Patents

• Yanfeng Zhang, Weina Niu, Lingfeng Yao, Jia Hu, Yizhuo Zhao, “A device and method for malicious traffic detection against label noise”, CN patent No. CN202310148063.0, Feb 2023.
• Weina Niu, Lingfeng Yao, Xiaosong Zhang, Jia Hu, Zhaoxu He, “An open set identification device and method for malicious traffic detection”, CN patent No. CN202310102130.5, Feb 2023.
• Weina Niu, Jia Hu, Xiaosong Zhang, Lingfeng Yao, Zhaoxu He, “A detection system and method for few-shot malicious traffic”, CN patent No. CN202310101380.7, Feb 2023.
• Yanfeng Zhang, Weina Niu, Jia Hu, Lingfeng Yao, “An IoT malicious traffic detection device against concept drift”, CN patent No. N202310148030.6, Feb 2023.
• Weina Niu, Xiaosong Zhang, Chong Wang, Lingfeng Yao, Tianci Dai, Lirui Zhao, Yukun Zhu, “A multi-view based HTTPS malware traffic detection system and method”, CN patent No. CN202210733908.8, June 2022.

🎖 Honors and Awards

• 2024.06 Student Travel Grant for ICC 2024
• 2023.10 Outstanding Graduate

🏛 Professional Service

Reviewer:

• IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security
• IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking
• Computer & Security
• Information Fusion
• AAAI 2026