Jiacheng Liang

About Me

I am a Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University, supervised by Dr. Ting Wang.

Research Interests

My expertise is in ensuring the Safety and Trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs). I work on identifying Security Challenges and developing Defensive Strategies to protect these models from adversarial threats. My recent work includes:

• Security Challenges – Investigate vulnerabilities in LLM watermarking and GraphRAG; jailbreak reasoning model and propose advanced methods to address these weaknesses.
• Defensive Strategies – Develop methods to defend against backdoor attacks* (self-defense mechanisms in agent) and jailbreaking (Data curation when finetuning and KV eviction when inference).

In addition, I possess extensive expertise and a strong interest in post-training, prompt engineering, inference optimization, LLM agents, and ensuring LLM alignment.

Recent Publications (Full List)

• GraphRAG under Fire
  Jiacheng Liang, Yuhui Wang, Changjiang Li, Rongyi Zhu, Tanqiu Jiang, Neil Gong, Ting Wang
  IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2026 (IEEE S&P’26)

• AutoRAN: Weak-to-Strong Jailbreaking of Large Reasoning Models
  Jiacheng Liang, Tanqiu Jiang, Yuhui Wang, Rongyi Zhu, Fenglong Ma, Ting Wang
  

• WaterPark: A Robustness Assessment of Language Model Watermarking
  Jiacheng Liang, Zian Wang, Lauren Hong, Shouling Ji, Ting Wang
  Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing(EMNLP’25)

• RobustKV: Defending Large Language Models against Jailbreak Attacks via KV Eviction
  Tanqiu Jiang, Zian Wang, Jiacheng Liang, Changjiang Li, Yuhui Wang, Ting Wang
  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR’25)

• Model Extraction Attacks Revisited
  Jiacheng Liang, Ren Pang, Changjiang Li, Ting Wang
  Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (Asia CCS’24)

• Data to Defense: The Role of Curation in Customizing LLMs Against Jailbreaking Attacks
  Xiaoqun Liu*, Jiacheng Liang*, Luoxi Tang, Muchao Ye, Weicheng Ma, Zhaohan Xi
  Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing(EMNLP’25)

Services

Program Committee/Reviewer

Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC)
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS)
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)
Cybersecurity Springer

Internships

2025.05 - 2025.10, Applied Scientist Intern at Amazon AGI Foundation - Responsible AI, Amazon, Boston.
Advisor: Dr. Charith Peris, Dr. Yao Ma

Collaborators and Previous Advisors

Teammates at ALPS-Lab: Ren Pang (Amazon), Zhaohan Xi (Binghamton University), Changjiang Li, Tanqiu Jiang, Zian Wang, Yuhui Wang, Rongyi Zhu

Previous Collaborators: Bochuan Cao (PSU), Qihua Zhou (SZU), Yanjing Ren (CUHK), Guoli Wei (USTC), Zicong Hong (HKUST), Jun Pan (HKPolyU)

Previous Advisors: Jingwei Li (UESTC), Song Guo (HKUST), Songze Li (SEU, HKUST)

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