Yixin Wu

profile2.jpeg

Im Oberen Werk 1

66386 St. Ingbert (Germany)

I’m a Ph.D. student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, where I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Michael Backes and Dr. Yang Zhang. Prior to coming to CISPA, I received my Bachelor’s degree from Sichuan University, where I daily worked with Prof. Cheng Huang. During my undergraduate, I was also a security engineer intern at Alibaba.

My research focuses on designing and developing trustworthy AI systems, ensuring they are safe, privacy-preserving, and secure. I am also interested in the responsible use of AI, with a focus on transparency and preventing the misuse of AI-generated content. Currently, I am passionate about building generative agents for security and privacy tasks, as well as social behavior simulation.


Research Interests


Honors and Awards

  • 2025
    Rising Star in EECS 2025, MIT
  • 2025
    ML and Systems Rising Star, MLCommons
  • 2025
    Abbe Grant, Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung
  • 2025
    Heidelberg Laureate Forum Young Researcher, The 12th Heidelberg Laureate Forum
  • 2021
    Outstanding Graduate Honor, Sichuan University
  • 2019
    National Scholarship, Ministry of Education of China

News

Apr 2026 Our paper titled “InferPilot: Autonomous Inference Attacks Against ML Services With LLM-Based Agents” was accepted by ACL Findings 2026.
Apr 2026 Our paper titled “Peering Behind the Shield: Guardrail Identification in Large Language Models” was accepted by ACL Findings 2026.
Apr 2026 Our paper titled “Rethinking Assessments of Prompt Injection Attacks” was accepted by ACL Findings 2026.
Sep 2025 I was selected as a Rising Star in EECS 2025!
Jul 2025 Our paper titled “UnsafeBench: Benchmarking Image Safety Classifiers on Real-World and AI-Generated Images” was accepted by ACM CCS 2025. See the website for more details!
Jun 2025 I was selected to recieve the Abbe Grant from the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung!
May 2025 I was selected as a Heidelberg Laureate Forum Young Researcher!
Mar 2025 I was selected as a ML and Systems Rising Star!
Jan 2025 Our paper titled “Synthetic Artifact Auditing: Tracing LLM-Generated Synthetic Data Usage in Downstream Applications” was accepted by Usenix Security 2025. See the website for more details!
Jan 2025 Our paper titled “On the Proactive Generation of Unsafe Images From Text-To-Image Models Using Benign Prompts” was accepted by Usenix Security 2025!

Selected Publications

  1. ACL Findings
    InferPilot: Autonomous Inference Attacks Against ML Services With LLM-Based Agents
    Yixin Wu, Rui Wen, Chi Cui, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
  2. ACL Findings
    Peering Behind the Shield: Guardrail Identification in Large Language Models
    Ziqing Yang, Yixin Wu, Rui Wen, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
  3. ACL Findings
    Rethinking Assessments of Prompt Injection Attacks
    Chi Cui, Yixin Wu, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
  4. Usenix Security
    Yixin Wu, Ziqing Yang, Yun Shen, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    In USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2025
  5. Usenix Security
    On the Proactive Generation of Unsafe Images From Text-To-Image Models Using Benign Prompts
    Yixin Wu, Ning Yu, Michael Backes, Yun Shen, and Yang Zhang
    In USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2025
  6. Usenix Security
    Xinyue Shen, Yixin Wu, Yiting Qu, Michael Backes, Savvas Zannettou, and Yang Zhang
    In USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2025
  7. Usenix Security
    Yixin Wu, Rui Wen, Michael Backes, Pascal Berrang, Mathias Humbert, Yun Shen, and Yang Zhang
    In USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security), 2024
  8. CCS
    Yixin Wu, Yun Shen, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2024
  9. PETS
    Yixin Wu, Xinlei He, Pascal Berrang, Mathias Humbert, Michael Backes, Neil Zhenqiang Gong, and Yang Zhang
    In Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), 2024
  10. EMNLP
    Yihan Ma, Xinyue Shen, Yixin Wu, Boyang Zhang, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    In Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2024