Zedian Shao

¡Mucho Gusto!

prof_pic.jpg

9th Floor


756 W Peachtree St NW


Atlanta, GA 30308

Hello there! I am a first-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Georgia Tech, and I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Teodora Baluta. My research interests lie in AI safety and security, with a particular focus on the security of generative AI recently.

Before joining Georgia Tech, I obtained my M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Duke University, where I worked with Prof. Neil Gong. I completed my B.S. in Data Science at Duke Kunshan University, advised by Prof. Peng Sun.

news

Jun 05, 2026 Our paper about covert control attacks is accepted to USENIX Security 2026. See you in Baltimore!
Apr 07, 2026 One paper is accepted to ACL 2026. See you in San Diego!
Aug 18, 2025 First day of my Ph.D. journey at Georgia Tech!

selected publications

  1. USENIX
    Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning
    Zedian Shao, Charles Fleming, and Teodora Baluta
    In USENIX Security Symposium, 2026
    arXiv
  2. AISec
    Enhancing Prompt Injection Attacks to LLMs via Poisoning Alignment
    Zedian Shao*, Hongbin Liu*, Jaden Mu, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong
    In ACM Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Security (AISec), 2025
    DOI arXiv
  3. ACL
    Leave My Images Alone: Preventing Multi-Modal Large Language Models from Analyzing Images via Visual Prompt Injection
    Zedian Shao*, Hongbin Liu*, Yuepeng Hu, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
    arXiv
  4. S&P
    PromptLocate: Localizing Prompt Injection Attacks
    Yuqi Jia, Yupei Liu, Zedian Shao, Jinyuan Jia, and Neil Zhenqiang Gong
    In IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2025
    arXiv