Zhihao Zhu

Postdoctoral Fellow at HKUST

Zhihao Zhu

I study trustworthy AI and large language models, with a focus on auditing, privacy, recommender systems, and training data exposure.

Google Scholar Research CV zhihaozhu@ust.hk

Research Focus

01

Trustworthy AI

Auditing model behavior, data revocation, membership inference, and model stealing risks in recommender and graph learning systems.

02

Large Language Models

Detecting training data exposure and understanding privacy risks in modern language and vision-language models.

Published Journal Article

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Forget Me If You Can: Auditing User Data Revocation in Recommendation Systems

Zhihao Zhu, Yi Yang, Yangyang Fan, Defu Lian

Information Systems Research, 2026

Working Papers

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HoneyImage: Verifiable, Harmless, and Stealthy Dataset Ownership Verification for Image Models

Zhihao Zhu, Jiale Han, Yi Yang

Management Information Systems Quarterly — Major Revision

Revealing Training Data Exposure in Vision-Language Large Models via Parameter Gradients

Zhihao Zhu, Hongyi Tang, Yi Yang, Ahmed Abbasi

Nature Communications — Major Revision

RecShield: Output-Level Attribute Unlearning in Recommender Systems

Zhihao Zhu, Yi Yang

Information Systems Research — Under Review

GraphMSA: Stress Testing Graph Classification Services Against Model Stealing Attacks

Zhihao Zhu, Yi Yang, Chenwang Wu, Defu Lian

INFORMS Journal on Computing — Under Review

AI Conferences

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TDDBench: A Benchmark for Training Data Detection

Zhihao Zhu, Yi Yang, Defu Lian

International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025

Identifying Pre-training Data in LLMs: A Neuron Activation-Based Detection Framework

Hongyi Tang*, Zhihao Zhu*, Yi Yang. Equal contribution.

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2025

Membership Inference Attacks against Sequential Recommender Systems

Zhihao Zhu, Chenwang Wu, Rui Fan, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen

The Web Conference, 2023

Service

I serve as a reviewer for Information Systems Research (ISR) and INFORMS Journal on Computing (IJOC). I also review for leading AI and NLP conferences, including NeurIPS, ICLR, and ACL Rolling Review.

About

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, advised by Prof. Yi Yang. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2025, advised by Prof. Defu Lian, and my Bachelor's degree from Fuzhou University in 2020.

I am always happy to discuss trustworthy AI, privacy, LLMs, and collaboration opportunities. You can reach me at zhihaozhu@ust.hk.