Welcome to my homepage!

I am currently a Professor at School of Cybersecurity, Tianjin University. My research focuses on Trustworthy AI and AI for Cybersecurity, with particular interests in advancing the safety and reliability of AI systems, and in leveraging AI agents for automated security analysis and vulnerability discovery.

Before joining Tianjin University, I was a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, working with Prof. Tianwei Zhang and Prof. Yang Liu. I received my Ph.D. degree from Nanyang Technological University advised by Prof. Tianwei Zhang, M.Eng. degree from Tianjin University under the supervision of Prof. Jianye Hao and B.Eng. degree from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.

Open Positions

I am actively seeking highly self-motivated Master’s students, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers to join my research group. Candidates with strong backgrounds in machine learning, security, or related areas are encouraged to get in touch.

Publications

• When Search Goes Wrong: Red-Teaming Web-Augmented Large Language Models
  Haoran Ou, Kangjie Chen#, Xingshuo Han, Gelei Deng, Jie Zhang, Han Qiu, Tianwei Zhang
  Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2026, CCF-A

• Dissecting the Safety Circuit: Neuronal Intervention for Transferable Adversarial Attacks on VLMs
  Chunlong Xie, Kangjie Chen, Shangwei Guo, Shudong Zhang, Jiamou Liu, Tianwei Zhang, Tao Xiang
  Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2026, CCF-A

• TEAR: Temporal-aware Automated Red-teaming for Text-to-Video Models
  Jiaming He, Guanyu Hou, Hongwei Li, Zhicong Huang, Kangjie Chen, Yi Yu, Wenbo Jiang, Guowen Xu, Tianwei Zhang
  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2026, CCF-A, Oral

• Unmasking Backdoors: An Explainable Defense via Gradient-Attention Anomaly Scoring for Pre-trained Language Models
  Anindya Sundar Das, Kangjie Chen#, Monowar Bhuyan
  The Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2026, CCF-A

• Towards Effective Prompt Stealing Attack against Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
  Shiqian Zhao, Chong Wang, Yiming Li, Yihao Huang, Wenjie Qu, Siew-Kei Lam, Yi Xie, Kangjie Chen, Jie Zhang, Tianwei Zhang
  The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2026, CCF-A

• Transstratal Adversarial Attack: Compromising Multi-Layered Defenses in Text-to-Image Models
  Chunlong Xie*, Kangjie Chen*, Shangwei Guo, Shudong Zhang, Tianwei Zhang, Tao Xiang
  The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2025, CCF-A, Spotlight

• Analogy-based Multi-Turn Jailbreak against Large Language Models
  Mengjie Wu, Zhenjun Lin, Yihao Huang, Kangjie Chen, Yuyang Zhang, Yuhan Huang, Run Wang, Lina Wang
  The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2025, CCF-A

• Impact-driven Context Filtering For Cross-file Code Completion
  Yanzhou Li, Shangqing Liu, Kangjie Chen, Tianwei Zhang, Yang Liu
  The 2nd Conference on Language Modeling, COLM 2025

• Automated Red Teaming for Text-to-Image Models through Feedback-Guided Prompt Iteration with Vision-Language Models
  Wei Xu*, Kangjie Chen*, Jiawei Qiu, Yuyang Zhang, Run Wang, Jin Mao, Tianwei Zhang, Lina Wang
  IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, ICCV 2025, CCF-A

• USD: NSFW Content Detection for Text-to-Image Models via Scene Graph
  Yuyang Zhang*, Kangjie Chen*, Xudong Jiang, Jiahui Wen, Yihui Jin, Ziyou Liang, Yihao Huang, Run Wang, Lina Wang
  The 34th USENIX Security Symposium, USENIX Security 2025, CCF-A

• TRUST-VLM: Thorough Red-teaming for Uncovering Safety Threats in Vision-Language Models
  Kangjie Chen, Muyang Li, Guanlin Li, Shudong Zhang, Shangwei Guo, Tianwei Zhang
  International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2025, CCF-A

• ART: Automatic Red-teaming for Text-to-Image Models to Protect Benign Users
  Guanlin Li, Kangjie Chen#, Shudong Zhang, Jie Zhang, Tianwei Zhang
  The Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2024, CCF-A

• EvilEdit: Backdooring Text-to-Image Diffusion Models in One Second
  Hao Wang, Shangwei Guo, Jialing He, Kangjie Chen, Shudong Zhang, Tianwei Zhang, Tao Xiang
  The 32nd ACM Multimedia Conference, ACM MM 2024, CCF-A

• Boosting Black-box Attack to Deep Neural Networks with Conditional Diffusion Models
  Renyang Liu, Wei Zhou, Tianwei Zhang, Kangjie Chen, Jun Zhao, and Kwok-Yan Lam
  The IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics & Security, TIFS 2024, CCF-A

• Protecting Confidential Virtual Machines from Hardware Performance Counter Side Channels
  Xiaoxuan Lou*, Kangjie Chen*, Guowen Xu, Han Qiu, Shangwei Guo, and Tianwei Zhang
  The 54th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, DSN 2024, CCF-B

• BadEdit: Backdooring Large Language Models by Model Editing
  Yanzhou Li, Tianlin Li#, Kangjie Chen#, Jian Zhang, Shangqing Liu, Wenhan Wang, Tianwei Zhang, and Yang Liu
  International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2024, CCF-A

• GuardHFL: Privacy Guardian for Heterogeneous Federated Learning
  Hanxiao Chen, Meng Hao, Hongwei Li, Kangjie Chen, Guowen Xu, Tianwei Zhang, Xilin Zhang
  International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2023, CCF-A

• Multi-target Backdoor Attacks for Code Pre-trained Models
  Yanzhou Li, Shangqing Liu, Kangjie Chen, Xiaofei Xie, Tianwei Zhang, and Yang Liu
  The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2023, CCF-A

• Clean-image Backdoor: Attacking Multi-label Models with Poisoned Labels Only
  Kangjie Chen, Xiaoxuan Lou, Guowen Xu, Jiwei Li, Tianwei Zhang
  International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2023, CCF-A, Oral

• ADS-lead: Lifelong Anomaly Detection in Autonomous Driving Systems
  Xingshuo Han, Yuan Zhou, Kangjie Chen, Han Qiu, Meikang Qiu, Yang Liu, Tianwei Zhang
  IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS), Volume: 24, Issue: 1, 2023

• BadPre: Task-agnostic Backdoor Attacks to Pre-trained NLP Foundation Models
  Kangjie Chen, Yuxian Meng, Xiaofei Sun, Shangwei Guo, Tianwei Zhang, Jiwei Li, Chun Fan
  International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2022, CCF-A

• Stealing Deep Reinforcement Learning Models for Fun and Profit
  Kangjie Chen, Shangwei Guo, Tianwei Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Yang Liu
  ACM ASIA Conference on Computer and Communications Security, AsiaCCS 2021, CCF-C

• Temporal Watermarks for Deep Reinforcement Learning Models
  Kangjie Chen, Shangwei Guo, Tianwei Zhang, Shuxin Li, Yang Liu
  International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2021, CCF-B

• A Unified Anomaly Detection Methodology for Lane-Following of Autonomous Driving Systems
  Xingshuo Han, Kangjie Chen, Yuan Zhou, Meikang Qiu, Chun Fan, Yang Liu, Tianwei Zhang
  IEEE International Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications, ISPA 2021, Most Innovative Paper Award

• Vulnerability Assessment of Deep Reinforcement Learning Models for Power System Topology Optimization
  Yan Zheng, Ziming Yan, Kangjie Chen, Jianwen Sun, Yan Xu, Yang Liu
  IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, Volume: 12, Issue: 4, 2021

• Stealthy and Efficient Adversarial Attacks against Deep Reinforcement Learning
  Jianwen Sun, Tianwei Zhang, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Yan Zheng, Kangjie Chen, Yang Liu
  Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2020, CCF-A

Professional Services

• Conference Reviewer for ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, CVPR, AAAI, IJCAI, ICCV
• Journal Reviewer for TDSC, TIFS, TIP, TMM, TCSVT

Teaching

• Introduction to Computational Thinking and Programming (SC1003), Teaching Assistant, 2022 Fall, Nanyang Technological University