VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Mingfei Zhang
dblp:22/9541
· DBLP profile ↗
7ranked-venue papers
4as first author
7since 2021 · last 2026
—ORCID · conflict
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Security and privacy · 4 · 3 first-author · 4 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Beyond Explicit Refusals: Soft-Failure Attacks on Retrieval-Augmented GenerationabstractExisting jamming attacks on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems typically induce explicit refusals or denial-ofservice behaviors, which are conspicuous and easy to detect.In this work, we formalize a subtler availability threat, termed soft failure, which degrades system utility by inducing fluent and coherent yet non-informative responses rather than overt failures.We propose Deceptive Evolutionary Jamming Attack (DEJA), an automated black-box attack framework that generates adversarial documents to trigger such soft failures by exploiting safety-aligned behaviors of large language models.DEJA employs an evolutionary optimization process guided by a fine-grained Answer Utility Score (AUS), computed via an LLM-based evaluator, to systematically degrade the certainty of answers while maintaining high retrieval success.Extensive experiments across multiple RAG configurations and benchmark datasets show that DEJA consistently drives responses toward low-utility soft failures, achieving SASR above 79% while keeping hard-failure rates below 15%, significantly outperforming prior attacks.The resulting adversarial documents exhibit high stealth, evading perplexity-based detection and resisting query paraphrasing, and transfer across model families to proprietary systems without retargeting. Wentao Zhang 0011, Yan Zhuang 0002, ZhuHang Zheng, Mingfei Zhang, Jiawen Deng 0006, Fuji Ren |
ACL (1) | 4 |
| 2026 | BunnyFinder: Finding Incentive Flaws for Ethereum Consensus
Rujia Li 0001, Mingfei Zhang, Xueqian Lu, Wenbo Xu 0002, Ying Yan 0002, Sisi Duan |
NDSS | 2 |
| 2026 | A Liveness Attack to Ethereum PoS with No Additional Cost
Mingfei Zhang, Rujia Li 0001, Xueqian Lu, Sisi Duan |
SP | 1 |
| 2026 | Risk-free Selfish Mining in Hybrid Predictability Model. A Case Study on Polkadot's NPoS
Mingfei Zhang, Rujia Li 0001, Sisi Duan |
WWW | 1 |
| 2026 | Parallel framework for intelligent prediction of multi-site fugitive dust: Combined with DustLSTM-Trans and FedProx-Dyn
Fangzhou Lin, Zihan Ma 0010, Shiyu Zhuang, Mingfei Zhang, Shiqi Wang 0034 |
Adv. Eng. Informatics | 7 |
| 2025 | Available Attestation: Towards a Reorg-Resilient Solution for Ethereum Proof-of-Stake
Mingfei Zhang, Rujia Li 0001, Xueqian Lu, Sisi Duan |
USENIX Security Symposium | 1 |
| 2024 | Max Attestation Matters: Making Honest Parties Lose Their Incentives in Ethereum PoS
Mingfei Zhang, Rujia Li 0001, Sisi Duan |
USENIX Security Symposium | 1 |