About Me

Hi! I am a Ph.D. student at Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, where I am advised by Prof. Yankai Lin. Before that, I got my Master’s degree at the Center for Data Science of Peking University. I was a member of LANCO group, where I was advised by Prof. Xu Sun. I am interested in Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). Specifically, I am working on the robustness and security problems of large language models, and also federated machine learning problems (optimization & security).

Education

Internship

  • Research Intern of Wechat AI, Tencent Inc., Jan. 2021 - Now.

Preprints

(# denotes Equal Contribution)

  • Watch Out for Your Agents! Investigating Backdoor Threats to LLM-Based Agents
    Wenkai Yang#, Xiaohan Bi#, Yankai Lin, Sishuo Chen, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun
    [arxiv, code]

  • Enabling Large Language Models to Learn from Rules
    Wenkai Yang, Yankai Lin, Jie Zhou, Jirong Wen
    [arxiv]

  • Integrating Local Real Data with Global Gradient Prototypes for Classifier Re-Balancing in Federated Long-Tailed Learning
    Wenkai Yang, Deli Chen, Hao Zhou, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun
    [arxiv]

Publications

(# denotes Equal Contribution)

  • Towards Codable Text Watermarking for Large Language Models
    Lean Wang#, Wenkai Yang#, Deli Chen#, Hao Zhou, Yankai Lin, Fandong Meng, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun
    ICLR 2024 [url, arxiv, code]

  • When to Trust Aggregated Gradients: Addressing Negative Client Sampling in Federated Learning
    Wenkai Yang, Yankai Lin, Guangxiang Zhao, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research [url, arxiv, code]

  • Communication Efficient Federated Learning for Multilingual Machine Translation with Adapter
    Yi Liu, Xiaohan Bi, Lei Li, Sishuo Chen, Wenkai Yang, Xu Sun
    Findings of ACL 2023 [arxiv, code]

  • Fine-Tuning Deteriorates General Textual Out-of-Distribution Detection by Distorting Task-Agnostic Features
    Sishuo Chen, Wenkai Yang, Xiaohan Bi, Xu Sun
    Findings of EACL 2023 [url, arxiv, code]

  • Expose Backdoors on the Way: A Feature-Based Efficient Defense against Textual Backdoor Attacks
    Sishuo Chen, Wenkai Yang, Zhiyuan Zhang, Xiaohan Bi, Xu Sun
    Findings of EMNLP 2022 [url, arxiv, code]

  • Well-classified Examples are Underestimated in Classification with Deep Neural Networks
    Guangxiang Zhao, Wenkai Yang, Xuancheng Ren, Lei Li, Yunfang Wu, Xu Sun
    AAAI 2022 [url, arxiv, code]

  • RAP: Robustness-Aware Perturbations for Defending against Backdoor Attacks on NLP Models
    Wenkai Yang, Yankai Lin, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun
    EMNLP 2021 [url, arxiv, code]

  • Rethinking Stealthiness of Backdoor Attack against NLP Models
    Wenkai Yang, Yankai Lin, Peng Li, Jie Zhou, Xu Sun
    ACL 2021 [url, code]

  • Be Careful about Poisoned Word Embeddings: Exploring the Vulnerability of the Embedding Layers in NLP Models
    Wenkai Yang, Lei Li, Zhiyuan Zhang, Xuancheng Ren, Xu Sun, Bin He
    NAACL-HLT 2021 [url, arxiv, code]

Awards

  • Excellent Graduate of Beijing Ordinary Colleges and Universities, 2022-2023
  • Excellent Graduate of Peking University, 2022-2023
  • National Scholarship of China (The highest scholarship for graduate students), 2020-2021
  • Pacemaker to Merit Student (The highest honor for graduate students), 2020-2021
  • Xingye Bank Scholarship, 2021-2022
  • Merit Student of PKU, 2021-2022

Contact

Email: kevenyang98 (at) gmail (dot) com