Hi there, welcome! I’m currently a third-year Ph.D. student in Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China. It’s a great fortunate to be advised by Prof. Yong Liu. I previously earned my B.E. degree in Software Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in June 2022.

I am interested in trustworthy AI, particularly focusing on robustness and fairness:

• Robustness. Developing theoretical analysis of attack & defense methods in AI.
• Fairness. Formulating intuitive and rigorous solutions to reduce AI discrimination.

Now I’m also interested in theoretical analysis of large language models.

Selected Papers

* indicates equal contribution

Understanding Model Ensemble in Transferable Adversarial Attack

Wei Yao*, Zeliang Zhang*, Huayi Tang, Yong Liu
arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.06851

Understanding Fairness Surrogate Functions in Algorithmic Fairness

Wei Yao*, Zhanke Zhou*, Zhicong Li, Bo Han, Yong Liu
TMLR 2024

Towards Tracing Trustworthiness Dynamics: Revisiting Pre-training Period of Large Language Models

Chen Qian*, Jie Zhang*, Wei Yao*, Dongrui Liu, Zhenfei Yin, Yu Qiao, Yong Liu, Jing Shao
ACL 2024 (Findings)

Random Smooth-based Certified Defense against Text Adversarial Attack

Zeliang Zhang*, Wei Yao*, Susan Liang, Chenliang Xu
EACL 2024 (Findings)

Fair Scratch Tickets: Finding Fair Sparse Networks without Weight Training

Pengwei Tang*, Wei Yao*, Zhicong Li, Yong Liu
CVPR 2023

Research Intern

• 2023.10-2024.3: Shanghai AI Laboratory, research intern, mentor: Dr. Jing Shao.

Honors and Awards

National Scholarship, 2019

Service

Conference Reviewer: ICLR 2025, AISTATS 2025

Journal Reviewer: Transactions on Machine Learning Research