Hao Cheng | The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou

About Me

Hello! I am a Ph.D. student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), Guangzhou. I am interested in trustworthy and efficient AI. My current research primarily focuses on ensuring the trustworthiness, robustness, and efficiency of various AI models, including:

Generative AI: Large Language Models, Multimodal Large Language Models (Large Vision Language Models, Large Audio Language Models), Diffusion Models;
Embodied AI: Vision Language Action Models, Imitation Learning, Humanoid Robot;
Discriminative AI: Convolutional Neural Network, Vision Transformer, Spiking Neural Network.

Education:

the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Cross-campus Study Ph.D., Prof.Jize Zhang, 08/2025 - now, HongKong, China SAR
the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Guangzhou, Ph.D., Prof.Renjing Xu, 09/2022 - now, Guangzhou, China
Northeastern University, Ph.D., Prof.Xue “Shelley” Lin, 09/2020 - 09/2022, Boston, USA
Xi’an Jiaotong University, Master, Prof.Ping Wang, 09/2017 - 07/2020, Xi’an, China
Hebei University of Technology, B.E., 09/2013 - 06/2017, Tianjing, China

Working Experience:

Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics Co., Ltd., Research Intern, 07/2025 - 09/2025, Beijing, China
SAMSUNG AI Research Center(SARC), Research Intern, 04/2021 - 09/2021, Xi’an, China
Alibaba DAMO Lab-Intelligent Computing Lab, Research Intern, 08/2020 - 03/2021, Shanghai, China

Research Experience:

University of Oxford, Collaborator, Dr.Jindong Gu and Prof.Philip Torr, 12/2023 - now
Xi’an Jiaotong University, Collaborator, Prof.Le Yang and Prof.Chao Shen, 11/2023 - now
UNC-Chapel Hill&CityUHK, Collaborator, Dr.Jinhao Duan and Prof.Kaidi Xu, 01/2019 - now
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Collaborator, Dr.Bhavya Kailkhura, 04/2020 - now
Northeastern University, MIT-IBM Waston AI Lab, Visiting Student, Prof.Xue “Shelley” Lin and Prof.Sijia Liu, 01/2019 - 06/2019
National University of Singapore, Visiting Student, 06/2018 - 08/2018

News

- [10/2025] One paper is accepted to Build Safe Robot@IROS 2025 as Lighted Oral.
- [10/2025] One paper is accepted to PM2CE@IROS 2025.
- [09/2025] HKUST-Cardiff-MI-BAAI Team: ICCV VQualA Challenge Top3 Winner.
- [09/2025] Team Xiaomi EV-AD VLA: IROS 2025 Top 2 Winner and Innovation Solution of the RoboSense Social Navigation Track.
- [09/2025] One paper is accepted to NeurIPS 2025 D&B Track.
- [08/2025]

Best student paper award of IJCAI 2025 Workshop on Deepfake Detection, Localization, and Interpretability.
- [07/2025] One paper is accepted to ACM MM 2025.
- [06/2025] One paper is accepted to ICCV 2025.
- [06/2025] One paper is accepted to IJCAI 2025 Workshop on Deepfake Detection, Localization, and Interpretability.
- [06/2025] I will serve as a reviewer of NeurIPS 2025, WACV 2025.
- [06/2025] One paper is accepted to IROS 2025.
- [04/2025] I will serve as a reviewer of ACM MM 2025, IROS 2025.
- [03/2025] One paper is accepted to ICASSP 2025; One paper is accepted to ICLR 2025 Workshop on Generative Models for Robot Learning.
- [01/2025] One paper is accepted to CVPR 2025.
- [11/2024] I will serve as a reviewer of CVPR 2025, ICRA 2025.
- [09/2024] One paper is accepted to NeurIPS 2024; One paper is accepted to ACM MobiCom 2024.
- [08/2024] I will serve as a reviewer of BMVC 2024, WACV 2024.
- [07/2024] Two papers are accepted to ECCV 2024.
- [06/2024] One paper is accepted to IROS 2024.
- [05/2024] One paper is accepted to ACL 2024.
- [01/2024] One paper is accepted to CVPR 2024.
- [12/2023] One paper is accepted to WACV 2024; One paper is accepted to IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence
- [08/2023] One paper is accepted to BMVC 2023.
- [05/2023] One paper is accepted to IJCAI 2023.

Selected Publications

Build Safe Robot @ IROS 2025

Manipulation Facing Threats: Evaluating Physical Vulnerabilities in End-to-End Vision Language Action Models

Hao Cheng*, Erjia Xiao*, Yichi Wang*, Qiang Zhang, Kaidi Xu, Mengshu Sun, Jize Zhang, Chao Shen, Philip Torr, Jindong Gu†, Renjing Xu†

[Lighted Oral] Build Safe Robot @ IROS 2025.

PDF Project Page

NeurIPS

Jailbreak-AudioBench: In-Depth Evaluation and Analysis of Jailbreak Threats for Large Audio Language Models

Hao Cheng*, Erjia Xiao*, Jing Shao*, Yichi Wang, Le Yang, Chao Shen, Philip Torr, Jindong Gu†, Renjing Xu†

NeurIPS Datasets and Benchmarks Track, 2025.

PDF Project Page

DDLI @ IJCAI 2025

Exploring Typographic Visual Prompts Injection Threats in Cross-Modality Generation Models

Hao Cheng*, Erjia Xiao*, Yichi Wang, Linfeng Zhang, Kaidi Xu, Mengshu Sun, Xiaoshuai Hao†, Jindong Gu†, Renjing Xu†

[Best Student Paper Award] The International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Workshop on Deepfake Detection, Localization, and Interpretability, 2025.

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ACM MM

Transfer Attack for Bad and Good: Explain and Boost Adversarial Transferability across Multimodal Large Language Models

Hao Cheng*, Erjia Xiao*, Jiayan Yang, Jinhao Duan, Yichi Wang, Jiahang Cao, Qiang Zhang, Le Yang, Kaidi Xu, Jindong Gu†, Renjing Xu†

ACM International Conference on Multimedia (ACM MM), 2025.

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ICCV

Truthprint: Mitigating lvlm object hallucination via latent truthful-guided pre-intervention

Jinhao Duan*, Fei Kong*, Hao Cheng, James Diffenderfer, Bhavya Kailkhura, Lichao Sun, Xiaofeng Zhu, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu

International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2025.

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CVPR

Not Just Text: Uncovering Vision Modality Typographic Threats in Image Generation Models

Hao Cheng*, Erjia Xiao*, Jiayan Yang, Jiahang Cao, Qiang Zhang, Jize Zhang, Kaidi Xu, Jindong Gu†, Renjing Xu†

Proceedings of the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2025.

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NeurIPS

Spiking Neural Network as Adaptive Event Stream Slicer

Jiahang Cao, Mingyuan Sun, Ziqing Wang, Hao Cheng, Qiang Zhang, Shibo Zhou, Renjing Xu

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 37 (NeurIPS), 2024.

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ECCV

Unveiling typographic deceptions: Insights of the typographic vulnerability in large vision-language models

Hao Cheng*, Erjia Xiao*, Jindong Gu, Le Yang, Jinhao Duan, Jize Zhang, Jiahang Cao, Kaidi Xu, Renjing Xu

European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024.

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IROS

Gaining the Sparse Rewards by Exploring Lottery Tickets in Spiking Neural Network

Hao Cheng, Jiahang Cao, Erjia Xiao, Mengshu Sun, Renjing Xu

IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2024.

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ACL

Shifting attention to relevance: Towards the predictive uncertainty quantification of free-form large language models

Jinhao Duan, Hao Cheng, Shiqi Wang, Alex Zavalny, Chenan Wang, Renjing Xu, Bhavya Kailkhura, Kaidi Xu

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024.

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CVPR

ACT-Diffusion: Efficient Adversarial Consistency Training for One-step Diffusion Models

Fei Kong, Jinhao Duan, Lichao Sun, Hao Cheng, Renjing Xu, Hengtao Shen, Xiaofeng Zhu, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu

Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2024.

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WACV

Spiking Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models

Jiahang Cao, Ziqing Wang, Hanzhong Guo, Hao Cheng, Qiang Zhang, Renjing Xu

Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2024.

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BMVC

RBFormer: Improve Adversarial Robustness of Transformer by Robust Bias

Hao Cheng, Jinhao Duan, Hui Li, Jiahang Cao, Ping Wang, Lyutianyang Zhang, Jize Zhang, Kaidi Xu, Renjing Xu

British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), 2023.

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IJCAI

Improve Video Representation with Temporal Adversarial Augmentation

Jinhao Duan, Quanfu Fan, Hao Cheng, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu

The International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 2023.

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WACV Workshop

More or Less (MoL): Defending against Multiple Perturbation Attacks on Deep Neural Networks through Model Ensemble and Compression

Hao Cheng, Kaidi Xu, Zhengang Li, Pu Zhao, Chenan Wang, Xue Lin, Bhavya Kailkhura, Ryan Goldhahn

IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision Workshops (WACVW), 2022.

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ICLR Workshop

Mixture of robust experts (more): A flexible defense against multiple perturbations

Hao Cheng, Kaidi Xu, Chenan Wang, Xue Lin, Bhavya Kailkhura, Ryan Goldhahn

ICLR Robust and reliable machine learning in the real world Workshop (ICLR Workshop), 2021.

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KDD Workshop

Defending against backdoor attack on deep neural networks

Hao Cheng, Kaidi Xu, Sijia Liu, Pin-Yu Chen, Pu Zhao, Xue Lin

KDD Workshop on Adversarial Learning Methods for Machine Learning and Data Mining (KDD AdvML), 2019.

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ICCV

Adversarial robustness vs. model compression, or both?

Shaokai Ye*, Kaidi Xu*, Sijia Liu, Hao Cheng, Jan-Henrik Lambrechts, Huan Zhang, Aojun Zhou, Kaisheng Ma, Yanzhi Wang, Xue Lin

International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2019.

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Journal

Early Termination of Intra Mode Decision Based on Most Probable Mode and SATD for H. 264/AVC encoding

Ping Wang, Hao Cheng

Journal of Signal Processing Systems, 2019

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Projects

PM2CE @ IROS 2025

Humanoid Occupancy: Enabling A Generalized Multimodal Occupancy Perception System on Humanoid Robots

Wei Cui, Haoyu Wang, Wenkang Qin, Yijie Guo, Gang Han, Wen Zhao, Jiahang Cao, Zhang Zhang, Jiaru Zhong, Jingkai Sun, Pihai Sun, Shuai Shi, Botuo Jiang, Jiahao Ma, Jiaxu Wang, Hao Cheng, Zhichao Liu, Yang Wang, Zheng Zhu, Guan Huang, Jian Tang, Qiang Zhang

IROS 2025 Workshop Perception and Planning for Mobile Manipulation in Changing Environments.

PDF Code

Preprint

HumanoidPano: Hybrid Spherical Panoramic-LiDAR Cross-Modal Perception for Humanoid Robots

Qiang Zhang, Zhang Zhang, Wei Cui, Jingkai Sun, Jiahang Cao, Yijie Guo, Gang Han, Wen Zhao, Jiaxu Wang, Chenghao Sun, Lingfeng Zhang, Hao Cheng, Yujie Chen, Lin Wang, Jian Tang, Renjing Xu

Preprint, 2025.

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Preprint

Efficient Multi-Prize Lottery Tickets: Enhanced Accuracy, Training, and Inference Speed

Hao Cheng, Pu Zhao, Yize Li, Xue Lin, James Diffenderfer, Ryan Goldhahn, Bhavya Kailkhura

Preprint, 2022

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