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

• Preprint Black-box Audio Watermark Removal via Diffusion Priors [Paper] [Demo] [Code]

  Lingfeng Yao, Xincong Zhong, Chenpei Huang, Xuandong Zhao, Hanqing Guo, Aohan Li, Jiang Liu, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Miao Pan

• ICASSP 2026 MSVS: Multi-Shell Viewpoint Sampling for Comprehensive Evaluation of 3D Watermarking [Paper] [Demo] [Code]

  Tomoya Matsubara, Lingfeng Yao, Chenpei Huang, Miao Pan, Hideo Saito

• Preprint SpeechVerifier: Robust Acoustic Fingerprint against Tampering Attacks via Watermarking [Paper] [Demo] [Code]

  Lingfeng Yao, Chenpei Huang, Shengyao Wang, Junpei Xue, Hanqing Guo, Jiang Liu, Xun Chen, Miao Pan

• AAAI 2026 Yours or Mine? Overwriting Attacks Against Neural Audio Watermarking [Paper]

  Lingfeng Yao, Chenpei Huang, Shengyao Wang, Junpei Xue, Hanqing Guo, Jiang Liu, Phone Lin, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Miao Pan

• AAAI 2026 iSeal: Encrypted Fingerprinting for Reliable LLM Ownership Verification [Paper] [Code]

  Zixun Xiong, Gaoyi Wu, Qingyang Yu, Mingyu Derek Ma, Lingfeng Yao, Miao Pan, Xiaojiang Du, Hao Wang

• Preprint Who’s Wearing? Ear Canal Biometric Key Extraction for User Authentication on Wireless Earbuds [Paper] [Demo]

  Chenpei Huang, Lingfeng Yao, Hui Zhong, Kyu In Lee, Lan Zhang, Xiaoyong Yuan, Tomoaki Ohtsuki, Miao Pan

• ICC 2024 A Robust Malicious Traffic Detection Framework with Low-quality Labeled Data [Paper]

  Lingfeng Yao, Weina Niu, Qingjun Yuan, Beibei Li, Yanfeng Zhang, Xiaosong Zhang

• Applied Intelligence 2024 Model-Agnostic Generation-Enhanced Technology for Few-Shot Intrusion Detection in IoT [Paper]

  Junpeng He, Lingfeng Yao, Muhammad Khurram Khan, Xiong Li, Weina Niu, Xiaosong Zhang, Fagen Li

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