Yage Zhang

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Me and the Shiba

૮₍ ˊᗜˋ₎ა

Hi! I’m Yage Zhang — or you can just call me Laqeey /ˈlɑː.tʃi/.

I am currently a PhD student at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, advised by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Michael Backes and Prof. Yang Zhang. Before this, I obtained my Master’s degree at Saarland University.

My research interests focus on

  • Practical AI Ecosystem Security: Identifying and addressing vulnerabilities and safety failures in real-world deployed AI systems.
  • Proactive AI-Society Risk Analysis: Studying emerging risks as AI agents interact with each other and with humans.

news

Sep 13, 2026 Two of our works (on Otome Game Communities and Shadow APIs) have been accepted to CCS 2026! See you in Hague!
Apr 30, 2026 Our work Sparse Models, Sparse Safety: Unsafe Routes in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs has been accepted to ICML 2026! See you in Seoul!
Apr 06, 2026 Our work DE-CLIP: Few-Shot Anomaly Detection via Difference-Guided Embedding Editing has been accepted to ACL 2026! See you in San Diego!
Aug 01, 2025 I’m excited to share that I officially joined CISPA as a PhD student!
Looking forward to the journey ahead in security & privacy research.

service

  • Conference Reviewer: COLM 2026
  • Journal Reviewer: ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS), IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS), and IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC)

selected publications

  1. CCS
    Otome.jpg
    “Shut Up and Let Me Enjoy My Otome”: Understanding and Measuring the Toxicity in Otome Game Communities
    Yage Zhang, Xinyue Shen, Yukun Jiang, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2026
    arXiv
  2. CCS
    shadowapi.png
    Real Money, Fake Models: Deceptive Model Claims in Shadow APIs
    Yage Zhang*, Yukun Jiang*, Zeyuan Chen, Michael Backes, Xinyue Shen, and Yang Zhang
    In ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2026
    arXiv PDF
  3. ICML
    MoE.png
    Sparse Models, Sparse Safety: Unsafe Routes in Mixture-of-Experts LLMs
    Yukun Jiang, Hai Huang, Mingjie Li, Yage Zhang, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    In International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2026
    arXiv PDF
  4. HarmfulSkillBench.png
    HarmfulSkillBench: How Do Harmful Skills Weaponize Your Agents?
    Yukun Jiang, Yage Zhang, Michael Backes, Xinyue Shen, and Yang Zhang
    arXiv preprint, 2026
    arXiv PDF Website Dataset
  5. ACL
    DE_CLIP.png
    DE-CLIP: Few-Shot Anomaly Detection via Difference-Guided Embedding Editing
    Yage Zhang, Yukun Jiang, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    In Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2026
    PDF
  6. Moltbook_Logo.png
    “Humans welcome to observe”: A First Look at the Agent Social Network Moltbook
    Yukun Jiang*, Yage Zhang*, Xinyue Shen*, Michael Backes, and Yang Zhang
    arXiv preprint, 2026
    arXiv PDF Website Dataset Coverage: WeChat TechXplore
  7. COLM
    hallu.jpg
    Cutting the Root of Hallucination: Structural Trimming for Vulnerability Mitigation in Code LLMs
    Yage Zhang
    In Conference on Language Modeling (COLM), 2025
    PDF
  8. data-10-00077-g007.png
    A Machine Learning Dataset of Artificial Inner Ring Damages on Cylindrical Roller Bearings Measured Under Varying Cross-Influences
    Schnur Christopher, Goodarzi Payman, Robin Yannick, Schneider Tizian, Schauer Julian, El Moutaouakil Houssam, Morsch Jannis, Ahmad Ali Ali, Yage Zhang, and Schütze Andreas
    2025
    Available from Lab for Measurement Technology, Saarland University
    DOI