VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Zelun Kong
dblp:241/3655
· DBLP profile ↗
9ranked-venue papers
2as first author
4since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0002-8045-7494ORCID · corroborated
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 3 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Security and privacy · 2 · 1 first-author · 2 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 2 · 1 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2 · 1 first-author · 1 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 1Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | DNN Latency Sequencing: Extracting DNN Architectures from Intel SGX Enclaves with Single-Stepping Attacks
Minkyung Park, Zelun Kong, DaveTian, Z. Berkay Celik |
NDSS | 2 |
| 2025 | IMUFuzzer: Resilience-based Discovery of Signal Injection Attacks on Robotic Aerial VehiclesabstractRobotic aerial vehicles (RAVs), particularly drones, are crucial in civil and military sectors. However, researchers have found that adversaries can inject noise into sensor measurements and cause physical impacts on the RAVs like crashes. Although identifying such signal injection attacks is essential to evaluate and improve the robustness of an RAV, it is challenging to discover them since their impact depends on the RAV’s physical states and the search space of noise signals and physical states is vast due to its dynamic nature.This paper proposes IMUFUZZER, a feedback-driven fuzzing framework, to automatically test an RAVs system and discover signal injection attacks. IMUFUZZER generates realistic noise signals for various inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors, and monitors their impact on RAV control to detect mission failures, leveraging a high-fidelity RAV simulator. To find the physical states that attacks depend on, IMUFUZZER generates various mission paths that the RAV will fly through. We develop a novel feedback mechanism to quantify the resilience of the RAV against attacks and efficiently guide the fuzzing process to find signal injection attacks. Using IMUFUZZER, we have discovered 23 successful signal injection attacks on popular RAV control software (ArduPilot). We evaluate the correctness and effectiveness of our feedback-based sensor fuzzing and demonstrate the feasibility of the discovered attacks through physical experiments. Sudharssan Mohan, Kyeongseok Yang, Zelun Kong, Yonghwi Kwon 0001, Junghwan Rhee, Tyler Summers, Hongjun Choi, Heejo Lee |
ASE | 3 |
| 2025 | TZ-DATASHIELD: Automated Data Protection for Embedded Systems via Data-Flow-Based Compartmentalization
Zelun Kong, Minkyung Park, Le Guan, Ning Zhang 0017 |
NDSS | 1 |
| 2021 | Adv-Makeup: A New Imperceptible and Transferable Attack on Face RecognitionabstractDeep neural networks, particularly face recognition models, have been shown to be vulnerable to both digital and physical adversarial examples. However, existing adversarial examples against face recognition systems either lack transferability to black-box models, or fail to be implemented in practice. In this paper, we propose a unified adversarial face generation method - Adv-Makeup, which can realize imperceptible and transferable attack under the black-box setting. Adv-Makeup develops a task-driven makeup generation method with the blending module to synthesize imperceptible eye shadow over the orbital region on faces. And to achieve transferability, Adv-Makeup implements a fine-grained meta-learning based adversarial attack strategy to learn more vulnerable or sensitive features from various models. Compared to existing techniques, sufficient visualization results demonstrate that Adv-Makeup is capable to generate much more imperceptible attacks under both digital and physical scenarios. Meanwhile, extensive quantitative experiments show that Adv-Makeup can significantly improve the attack success rate under black-box setting, even attacking commercial systems. Bangjie Yin, Wenxuan Wang 0003, Taiping Yao, Zelun Kong, Shouhong Ding, Cong Liu 0005 |
IJCAI | 5 |
| 2020 | PhysGAN: Generating Physical-World-Resilient Adversarial Examples for Autonomous DrivingabstractAlthough Deep neural networks (DNNs) are being pervasively used in vision-based autonomous driving systems, they are found vulnerable to adversarial attacks where small-magnitude perturbations into the inputs during test time cause dramatic changes to the outputs. While most of the recent attack methods target at digital-world adversarial scenarios, it is unclear how they perform in the physical world, and more importantly, the generated perturbations under such methods would cover a whole driving scene including those fixed background imagery such as the sky, making them inapplicable to physical world implementation. We present PhysGAN, which generates physical-world-resilient adversarial examples for misleading autonomous driving systems in a continuous manner. We show the effectiveness and robustness of PhysGAN via extensive digital- and real-world evaluations. We compare PhysGAN with a set of state-of-the-art baseline methods, which further demonstrate the robustness and efficacy of our approach. We also show that PhysGAN outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods. To the best of our knowledge, PhysGAN is probably the first technique of generating realistic and physical-world-resilient adversarial examples for attacking common autonomous driving scenarios. Zelun Kong, Cong Liu 0005 |
CVPR | 1 |
| 2020 | DeepBillboard: systematic physical-world testing of autonomous driving systemsabstractDeep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely applied in autonomous systems such as self-driving vehicles. Recently, DNN testing has been intensively studied to automatically generate adversarial examples, which inject small-magnitude perturbations into inputs to test DNNs under extreme situations. While existing testing techniques prove to be effective, particularly for autonomous driving, they mostly focus on generating digital adversarial perturbations, e.g., changing image pixels, which may never happen in the physical world. Thus, there is a critical missing piece in the literature on autonomous driving testing: understanding and exploiting both digital and physical adversarial perturbation generation for impacting steering decisions. In this paper, we propose a systematic physical-world testing approach, namely DeepBillboard, targeting at a quite common and practical driving scenario: drive-by billboards. DeepBillboard is capable of generating a robust and resilient printable adversarial billboard test, which works under dynamic changing driving conditions including viewing angle, distance, and lighting. The objective is to maximize the possibility, degree, and duration of the steering-angle errors of an autonomous vehicle driving by our generated adversarial billboard. We have extensively evaluated the efficacy and robustness of DeepBillboard by conducting both experiments with digital perturbations and physical-world case studies. The digital experimental results show that DeepBillboard is effective for various steering models and scenes. Furthermore, the physical case studies demonstrate that DeepBillboard is sufficiently robust and resilient for generating physical-world adversarial billboard tests for real-world driving under various weather conditions, being able to mislead the average steering angle error up to 26.44 degrees. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating the possibility of generating realistic and continuous physical-world tests for practical autonomous driving systems; moreover, DeepBillboard can be directly generalized to a variety of other physical entities/surfaces along the curbside, e.g., a graffiti painted on a wall. Husheng Zhou, Wei Li 0159, Zelun Kong, Yuqun Zhang, Bei Yu 0001, Lingming Zhang 0001, Cong Liu 0005 |
ICSE | 3 |
| 2019 | Robust High Dimensional Stream Classification with Novel Class DetectionabstractA primary challenge in label prediction over a data stream is the emergence of instances belonging to unknown or novel class over time. Traditionally, studies addressing this problem aim to detect such instances using cluster-based mechanisms. They typically assume that instances from the same class are closer to each other than those belonging to different classes in observed feature space. Unfortunately, this may not hold true in higher-dimensional feature space such as images. In recent years, Convolutional neural network (CNN) have emerged as a leading system to be employed in many real-world application. Yet, based on the assumption of closed world dataset with a fixed number of categories, CNN lacks robustness for novel class detection, so it is unclear on how such models can be used to deal with novel class instances along a high-dimensional image stream. In this paper, we focus on addressing this challenge by proposing an effective learning framework called CNN-based Prototype Ensemble (CPE) for novel class detection and correction. Our framework includes a prototype ensemble loss (PE) to improve the intra-class compactness and expand inter-class separateness in the output feature representation, thereby enabling the robustness of novel class detection. Moreover, we provide an incremental learning strategy which maintains a constant amount of exemplars to update the network, making it more practical for real-world application. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework by comparing its performance over multiple realworld image benchmark data streams with existing state-of-theart data stream detection techniques. The implementation of CPE is on: https://github.com/Vitvicky/Convolutional-Net-PrototypeEnsemble Zhuoyi Wang, Zelun Kong, Swarup Chandra, Hemeng Tao, Latifur Khan |
ICDE | 2 |
| 2019 | Metric Learning based Framework for Streaming Classification with Concept EvolutionabstractA primary challenge in label prediction over a stream of continuously occurring data instances is the emergence of instances belonging to unknown or novel classes. It is imperative to detect such novel-class instances quickly along the stream for a superior prediction performance. Existing techniques that perform novel class detection typically employ a clustering-based mechanism by observing that instances belonging to the same class (intra-class) are closer to each other (cohesion) than inter-class samples (separation). While this is generally true in low dimensional feature spaces, we observe that such a property is not intrinsic among instances in complex real-world high-dimensional feature space such as images and text. In this paper, we focus on addressing this key challenge that negatively affects prediction performance of a data stream classifier. Concretely, we develop a metric learning mechanism that transforms high-dimensional features into a latent feature space to make above property holds true. Unlike existing metric learning method which only focus on classification task, our approach address the novel class detection and stream classification simultaneously. We showcase a framework along the stream to achieve larger prediction performance compared to existing state-of-the-art detection techniques while using the least amount of labeled data during detection. Extensive experimental results on simulated and real-world stream demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Zhuoyi Wang, Hemeng Tao, Zelun Kong, Swarup Chandra, Latifur Khan |
IJCNN | 3 |
| 2019 | A General Analysis Framework for Soft Real-Time TasksabstractMuch recent work has been conducted on supporting soft real-time tasks on multiprocessors due to the multicore revolution. While most earlier works focus on the traditional sporadic task model with deterministic worst-case specification, several recent works investigate the stochastic nature of many workloads seen in practice, specifying task execution times using average-case provisioning instead of the worst case. Unfortunately, all the existing work on supporting soft real-time workloads ignores a simple practical fact that the job inter-arrival time (or task period) is also stochastic for many real-world applications. Adopting a fixed worst-case period to model all the arriving pattern is rather pessimistic and may result in significant capacity loss in practice. Based on these observations, we present a general soft real-time multiprocessor schedulability analysis framework in this paper for practical sporadic task systems specified by stochastic period and execution demand, following probability distributions. Our analysis can be generally applied to global tunable priority-based schedulers, which allow any job's priority to be changed dynamically at runtime within a priority window of constant length. We have extensively evaluated the analysis framework using a MPEG video decoding case study and simulation-based experiments. Experimental results demonstrate significant advantages of our analysis, which yields over 200 and 50 percent improvements compared to existing analysis assuming worst-case task periods in terms of schedulability and magnitude of the derived tardiness bound, respectively. Zheng Dong 0002, Cong Liu 0005, Soroush Bateni, Zelun Kong, Liang He 0002, Lingming Zhang 0001, Ravi Prakash 0001, Yuqun Zhang |
IEEE Trans. Parallel Distributed Syst. | 4 |