Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Dissertation:
Beyond Capability: Safe & Reliable Foundation Models at Scale
PDF
Jan. 2022 — present
B.Eng. in Civil Engineering
Outstanding Graduates Award of Shanghai
Sept. 2015 — June 2020
Cross-disciplinary Scholars in Science and Technology (CSST) Program
July 2019 — Sept. 2019
Industry and Academic Experience
Applied Deep Learning PhD Research Intern
May 2026 — present
Research Scientist Intern
May 2022 — Aug. 2022
Graduate Research Assistant
May 2021 — present
Awards and Honors
VIS 2026 Best Short Paper Honorable Mention
UNIPO: Unified Interactive Visual Explanation for RL Fine-Tuning Policy Optimization
2026
Selected for Oral presentation
Large Reasoning Models Learn Better Alignment from Flawed Thinking is a virtual oral presentation at EMNLP 2026
2026
Selected for Oral presentation
Differentiable Rendering Powered End-to-End Adversarial Attack Evaluation is an oral presentation at PAKDD 2026
2026
Selected for Oral presentation
Self-supervised table structure recognition is an oral presentation at AAAI 2024 Workshop
2024
Selected for Oral presentation
Transformer for table structure recognition is an oral presentation at NeurIPS 2023 Workshop
2023
BMVC 2023 Best Poster Award
Only five of the accepted papers are selected for the award
2023
Outstanding Graduates in Shanghai
For top 5% undergraduates graduating in 2020.
2020
National Scholarship
Stipend awarded to top 2% undergraduates in all China's universities.
2017 — 2018
Tongji University Excellent Student
For top 5% undergraduates in Tongji University.
2017 — 2018
First Prize of Tongji University Scholarship of Excellence
For outstanding undergraduates in Tongji University.
2016 — 2017
Publications
NeurIPS Evaluations & Datasets Track. 2026.
@inproceedings{zheng2026veriworld,
title={VeriWorld: A Verifiable Visual SWE-Bench for Spatial Reasoning in 3D Environments},
author={Zheng, Yan and Peng, ShengYun and Liang, Xuyao and Cong, Xiaoyan and Chen, Nuo and Liu, Bangya and Wang, Zihan and Cong, Wenyan and Fan, Zhiwen and Wang, Zhangyang},
booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Evaluations and Datasets Track},
year={2026}
}
EMNLP. 2026.
@article{peng2025large,
title={Large reasoning models learn better alignment from flawed thinking},
author={Peng, ShengYun and Chen, Pin-Yu and Smith, Eric and Jiang, Song and Zhan, Hongyuan and Wang, Haozhu and Pasupuleti, Mahesh and Chau, Duen Horng and Chi, Jianfeng},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.00938},
year={2025}
}
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). 2026.
@article{cho2026unipo,
title={UNIPO: Unified Interactive Visual Explanation for RL Fine-Tuning Policy Optimization},
author={Cho, Aeree and Greenhalgh, Alexander D. and Bodea, Jonathan and Peng, ShengYun and Chau, Duen Horng},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.11549},
year={2026}
}
PAKDD. 2026.
@inproceedings{phute2026differentiable,
title={Differentiable Rendering Powered End-to-End Adversarial Attack Evaluation},
author={Phute, Mansi and Hull, Matthew and Wang, Haoran and Helbling, Alec and Peng, ShengYun and Lunardi, Willian and Andreoni, Martin and Lee, Wenke and Chau, Duen Horng},
booktitle={Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD)},
series={Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
volume={16599},
pages={107--120},
year={2026},
publisher={Springer},
doi={10.1007/978-981-92-1465-5_9}
}
EMNLP. 2025.
@article{lee2025interpretation,
title={Interpretation Meets Safety: A Survey on Interpretation Methods and Tools for Improving LLM Safety},
author={Lee, Seongmin and Cho, Aeree and Kim, Grace C and Peng, ShengYun and Phute, Mansi and Chau, Duen Horng},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.05451},
year={2025}
}
NeurIPS. 2025.
@article{peng2025shape,
title={Shape it Up! Restoring LLM Safety during Finetuning},
author={Peng, ShengYun and Chen, Pin-Yu and Chi, Jianfeng and Lee, Seongmin and Chau, Duen Horng},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.17196},
year={2025}
}
AAAI Demo. 2025.
@inproceedings{lee2025llm,
title={Llm attributor: Interactive visual attribution for llm generation},
author={Lee, Seongmin and Wang, Zijie J and Chakravarthy, Aishwarya and Helbling, Alec and Peng, ShengYun and Phute, Mansi and Chau, Duen Horng Polo and Kahng, Minsuk},
booktitle={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
volume={39},
number={28},
pages={29655--29657},
year={2025}
}
Xiaohui Chen,
Satya Shukla,
Mahmoud Azab,
Aashu Singh,
Qifan Wang,
David Yang,
ShengYun Peng,
Hanchao Yu,
Shen Yan,
Xuewen Zhang,
Baosheng He
ICCV. 2025.
@article{chen2024compcap,
title={Compcap: Improving multimodal large language models with composite captions},
author={Chen, Xiaohui and Shukla, Satya Narayan and Azab, Mahmoud and Singh, Aashu and Wang, Qifan and Yang, David and Peng, ShengYun and Yu, Hanchao and Yan, Shen and Zhang, Xuewen and others},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.05243},
year={2024}
}
ACL. 2025.
@article{wang2025inference,
title={Inference Compute-Optimal Video Vision Language Models},
author={Peiqi Wang, ShengYun Peng, Xuewen Zhang, Hanchao Yu, Yibo Yang, Lifu Huang, Fujun Liu, Qifan Wang},
journal={ACL},
year={2025}
}
NeurIPS. 2024.
@article{peng2024navigating,
title={Navigating the Safety Landscape: Measuring Risks in Finetuning Large Language Models},
author={Peng, ShengYun and Chen, Pin-Yu and Hull, Matthew and Chau, Duen Horng},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.17374},
year={2024}
}
NeurIPS TRL Workshop. 2024.
@article{peng2024unitable,
title={UniTable: Towards a Unified Framework for Table Recognition via Self-Supervised Pretraining},
author={Peng, ShengYun and Chakravarthy, Aishwarya and Lee, Seongmin and Wang, Xiaojing and Balasubramaniyan, Rajarajeswari and Chau, Duen Horng},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.04822},
year={2024}
}
IJCAI Demo. 2024.
@inproceedings{lee2024interactive,
title={Interactive Visual Learning for Stable Diffusion},
author={Lee, Seongmin and Hoover, Benjamin and Strobelt, Hendrik and Wang, Zijie J. and Peng, ShengYun and Wright, Austin and Li, Kevin and Park, Haekyu and Yang, Haoyang and Chau, Duen Horng},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
pages={8721--8724},
doi={10.24963/ijcai.2024/1017},
year={2024}
}
AAAI SDU Workshop. 2024.
@article{peng2024self,
title={Self-supervised Pre-training for Table Structure Recognition Transformer},
author={ShengYun Peng, Seongmin Lee, Xiaojing Wang, Raji Balasubramaniyan, Duen Horng Chau},
year={2024}
}
NeurIPS TRL Workshop. 2023.
@article{peng2023high,
title={High-Performance Transformers for Table Structure Recognition Need Early Convolutions},
author={ShengYun Peng, Seongmin Lee, Xiaojing Wang, Raji Balasubramaniyan, Duen Horng Chau},
year={2023}
}
ICLR Tiny Papers Track. 2024.
@misc{phute2023llm,
title={LLM Self Defense: By Self Examination, LLMs Know They Are Being Tricked},
author={Mansi Phute and Alec Helbling and Matthew Hull and ShengYun Peng and Sebastian Szyller and Cory Cornelius and Duen Horng Chau},
year={2023},
eprint={2308.07308},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL}
}
BMVC. 2023.
@article{peng2023robust,
title={Robust Principles: Architectural Design Principles for Adversarially Robust CNNs},
author={Peng, ShengYun and Xu, Weilin and Cornelius, Cory and Hull, Matthew and Li, Kevin and Duggal, Rahul and Phute, Mansi and Martin, Jason and Chau, Duen Horng},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.16258},
year={2023}
}
IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS). 2024.
@article{lee2023diffusion,
title={Diffusion Explainer: Visual Explanation for Text-to-image Stable Diffusion},
author={Lee, Seongmin and Hoover, Benjamin and Strobelt, Hendrik and Wang, Zijie J and Peng, ShengYun and Wright, Austin and Li, Kevin and Park, Haekyu and Yang, Haoyang and Chau, Duen Horng},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.03509},
year={2023}
}
ECCV AROW Workshop. 2022.
@inproceedings{das2022skelevision,
title={Skelevision: Towards adversarial resiliency of person tracking with multi-task learning},
author={Das, Nilaksh and Peng, ShengYun and Chau, Duen Horng},
booktitle={European Conference on Computer Vision},
pages={449--466},
year={2022},
organization={Springer}
}
CVPR Demo. 2022.
@inproceedings{vellaichamy2022detectordetective,
title={DetectorDetective: Investigating the Effects of Adversarial Examples on Object Detectors},
author={Vellaichamy, Sivapriya and Hull, Matthew and Wang, Zijie J and Das, Nilaksh and Peng, ShengYun and Park, Haekyu and Chau, Duen Horng Polo},
booktitle={Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition},
pages={21484--21491},
year={2022}
}
Smart Structures and Systems. 2021.
@article{peng2021structural,
title={A novel DNN tracking algorithm for structural system identification},
author={Peng, ShengYun and Yan, LingFeng and He, Bin and Zhou, Ying},
journal={Smart Structures and Systems},
year={2021},
doi={10.12989/SSS.2021.27.5.803},
url={https://www.koreascience.or.kr/article/JAKO202117651384969.page}
}
Signal Processing, Image Communication. 2020.
@article{ZHANG2020115756,
title = {DSiamMFT: An RGB-T fusion tracking method via dynamic Siamese networks using multi-layer feature fusion},
author = {Xingchen Zhang and Ping Ye and Shengyun Peng and Jun Liu and Gang Xiao},
journal = {Signal Processing: Image Communication},
year = {2020},
volume = {84},
pages = {115756},
issn = {0923-5965},
doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.image.2019.115756},
url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092359651930342X},
}
Signal, Image and Video Processing. 2019.
@article{liu2019anti,
title={Anti-occlusion object tracking based on correlation filter},
author={Liu, Jun and Xiao, Gang and Zhang, Xingchen and Ye, Ping and Xiong, Xingzhong and Peng, Shengyun},
journal={Signal, Image and Video Processing},
year={2019},
volume={14},
pages={753-761},
doi={10.1007/s11760-019-01601-6}
}
IEEE Access. 2019.
@article{zhang2019siamft,
title={SiamFT: An RGB-Infrared Fusion Tracking Method via Fully Convolutional Siamese Networks},
author={Zhang, Xingchen and Ye, Ping and Peng, Shengyun and Liu, Jun and Gong, Ke and Xiao, Gang},
journal={IEEE Access},
year={2019},
volume={7},
number={},
pages={122122-122133},
doi={10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2936914}
}
22nd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION). 2019.
@INPROCEEDINGS{9011253,
title={Object Fusion Tracking Based on Visible and Infrared Images Using Fully Convolutional Siamese Networks},
author={Zhang, Xingchen and Ye, Ping and Qiao, Dan and Zhao, Junhao and Peng, Shengyun and Xiao, Gang},
booktitle={2019 22nd International Conference on Information Fusion (FUSION)},
year={2019},
pages={1-8},
}
Preprint
arXiv preprint. 2024.
@article{lau2024nonrobust,
title={Non-Robust Features are Not Always Useful in One-Class Classification},
author={Lau, Matthew and Wang, Haoran and Helbling, Alec and Hull, Matthew and Peng, ShengYun and Andreoni, Martin and Lunardi, Willian T. and Lee, Wenke},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.06372},
year={2024}
}
arXiv preprint. 2023.
@article{peng2023robarch,
title={RobArch: Designing Robust Architectures against Adversarial Attacks},
author={Peng, ShengYun and Xu, Weilin and Cornelius, Cory and Li, Kevin and Duggal, Rahul and Chau, Duen Horng and Martin, Jason},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.03110},
year={2023}
}
arXiv preprint. 2022.
@article{duggal2022imbnas,
title={IMB-NAS: Neural Architecture Search for Imbalanced Datasets},
author={Duggal, Rahul and Peng, Shengyun and Zhou, Hao and Chau, Duen Horng},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.00136},
year={2022}
}
arXiv preprint. 2020.
@article{peng2020accurate,
title={Accurate Anchor Free Tracking},
author={Peng, Shengyun and Yu, Yunxuan and Wang, Kun and He, Lei},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.07560},
year={2020}
}
Press
Teaching
Organized project teams, graded projects, and held weekly office hours for an online graduate course with 1k+ students enrolled.
Spring 2025
Grants and Funding
Attack and Defense on Object Detector
Co-authored research proposal from Technology Innovation Institute (TII)
2024 — 2026
Document Understanding
Co-authored research proposal from Automatic Data Processing (ADP), Inc.
2022 — 2023
Talks
Safety Alignment of Generative Foundation Models
Georgia Tech Thesis Proposal
Nov. 2025
Microsoft Research
Mar. 2026
Capital One Research
Mar. 2026
Georgia Tech HotCSE Event
Apr. 2026
UniTable: Towards a Unified Table Foundation Model
ADP AI Community of Practice Meetup
Mar. 2024
Self-supervised Pre-training for Table Structure Recognition Transformer
AAAI 2024 Scientific Document Understanding Workshop
Feb. 2024
High-Performance Transformers for Table Structure Recognition Need Early Convolutions
NeurIPS 2023 2nd Table Representation Workshop
Dec. 2023
Robust Principles
DARPA GARD PI Meeting (Evaluation 7)
Oct. 2023
Exploration of Robust Model Architectures
DARPA GARD PI Meeting (Evaluation 6)
May 2023
In Search of Robust Architectures against Adversarial Attacks
Intel Labs (Internship Report)
Aug. 2022
A New Siamese-based Tracking for Structural Health Monitoring
International Workshop on Data Science in Civil Engineering
June 2019
Service
Program Committee
SIAM International Conference on Data Mining
(
SDM)
2024
Reviewer
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
(
ICASSP)
2026
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
(
ACL)
2025
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
(
EMNLP)
2026
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
(
AISTATS)
2025 ·
2026
International Conference on Machine Learning
(
ICML)
2023 ·
2025 ·
2026
International Conference on Learning Representations
(
ICLR)
2025 ·
2026 ·
2027
ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
(
KDD)
2025 ·
2026 ·
2027
Neural Information Processing Systems
(
NeurIPS)
2024 ·
2025 ·
2026
European Conference on Computer Vision
(
ECCV)
2026
International Conference on Computer Vision
(
ICCV)
2023
AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(
AAAI)
2027
IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision
(
WACV)
2027
IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
(
TIP)
2025
Signal, Image and Video Processing
2025
IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
2023
Signal Processing: Image Communication
2022
Mentoring
MS in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Aug. 2025 — Dec. 2025
MS in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Now: CS PhD at Georgia Institute of Technology
Apr. 2023 — Dec. 2025
BS in Computer Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Now: ML PhD at Carnegie Mellon University
Aug. 2022 — May 2023
M.S. in Analytics - Data Science, Georgia Institute of Technology
Now: Senior Data Scientist at Cognira
May 2022 — May 2023
M.S. in Computational Data Analytics, Georgia Institute of Technology
Now: Applied AI/ML Lead at JPMorgan Chase
Oct. 2021 — May 2022