Xiangtao Meng

dblp:168/4733 · DBLP profile ↗
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5ranked-venue papers
1as first author
5since 2021 · last 2025
0009-0006-5613-8932ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Security and privacy · 4 · 1 first-author · 4 since 2021Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 DCMI: A Differential Calibration Membership Inference Attack Against Retrieval-Augmented Generation
abstract
While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) effectively reduces hallucinations by integrating external knowledge bases, it introduces vulnerabilities to membership inference attacks (MIAs), particularly in systems handling sensitive data. Existing MIAs targeting RAG's external databases often rely on model responses but ignore the interference of non-member-retrieved documents on RAG outputs, limiting their effectiveness. To address this, we propose DCMI, a differential calibration MIA that mitigates the negative impact of non-member-retrieved documents. Specifically, DCMI leverages the sensitivity gap between member and non-member retrieved documents under query perturbation. It generates perturbed queries for calibration to isolate the contribution of member-retrieved documents while minimizing the interference from non-member-retrieved documents. Experiments under progressively relaxed assumptions show that DCMI consistently outperforms baselines—for example, achieving 97.42% AUC and 94.35% Accuracy against the RAG system with Flan-T5, exceeding the MBA baseline by over 40%. Furthermore, on real-world RAG platforms such as Dify and MaxKB, DCMI maintains a 10%-20% advantage over the baseline. These results highlight significant privacy risks in RAG systems and emphasize the need for stronger protection mechanisms. We appeal to the community's consideration of deeper investigations, like ours, against the data leakage risks in rapidly evolving RAG systems.
Xiangtao Meng, Yingkai Dong, Zheng Li 0023, Shanqing Guo
CCS2
2025 ErrorTrace: A Black-Box Traceability Mechanism Based on Model Family Error Space
abstract
The open-source release of large language models (LLMs) enables malicious users to create unauthorized derivative models at low cost, posing significant threats to intellectual property (IP) and market stability. Existing IP protection methods either require access to model parameters or are vulnerable to fine-tuning attacks. To fill this gap, we propose ErrorTrace, a robust and black-box traceability mechanism for protecting LLM IP. Specifically, ErrorTrace leverages the unique error patterns of model families by mapping and analyzing their distinct error spaces, enabling robust and efficient IP protection without relying on internal parameters or specific query responses. Experimental results show that ErrorTrace achieves a traceability accuracy of 0.8518 for 27 base models when the suspect model is not included in ErrorTrace's training set, outperforming the baseline by 0.2593. Additionally,ErrorTrace successfully tracks 34 fine-tuned, pruned and merged models across various scenarios, demonstrating its broad applicability and robustness. In addition, ErrorTrace shows a certain level of resilience when subjected to adversarial attacks. Our code is available at: https://github.com/csdatazcc/ErrorTrace.
Chuanchao Zang, Xiangtao Meng, Tianshuo Cong, Yaxing Zha, Dong Qi, Zheng Li 0023, Shanqing Guo
NeurIPS2
2025 Fuzz-Testing Meets LLM-Based Agents: An Automated and Efficient Framework for Jailbreaking Text-to-Image Generation Models
abstract
Text-to-image (T2I) generative models have revolutionized content creation by transforming textual descriptions into high-quality images. However, these models are vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks, where carefully crafted prompts bypass safety mechanisms to produce unsafe content. While researchers have developed various jailbreak attacks to expose this risk, these methods face significant limitations, including impractical access requirements, easily detectable unnatural prompts, restricted search spaces, and high query demands on the target system. In this paper, we propose JailFuzzer, a novel fuzzing framework driven by large language model (LLM) agents, designed to efficiently generate natural and semantically meaningful jailbreak prompts in a black-box setting. Specifically, JailFuzzer employs fuzz-testing principles with three components: a seed pool for initial and jailbreak prompts, a guided mutation engine for generating meaningful variations, and an oracle function to evaluate jailbreak success. Furthermore, we construct the guided mutation engine and oracle function by LLM-based agents, which further ensures efficiency and adaptability in black-box settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JailFuzzer has significant advantages in jailbreaking T2I models. It generates natural and semantically coherent prompts, reducing the likelihood of detection by traditional defenses. Additionally, it achieves a high success rate in jailbreak attacks with minimal query overhead, outperforming existing methods across all key metrics. This study underscores the need for stronger safety mechanisms in generative models and provides a foundation for future research on defending against sophisticated jailbreaking attacks. JailFuzzer is open-source and available at this repository: https://github.com/YingkaiD/JailFuzzer.
Yingkai Dong, Xiangtao Meng, Ning Yu 0006, Zheng Li 0023, Shanqing Guo
SP2
2024 AVA: Inconspicuous Attribute Variation-based Adversarial Attack bypassing DeepFake Detection
abstract
While DeepFake applications are becoming popular in recent years, their abuses pose a serious privacy threat. Unfortunately, most related detection algorithms to mitigate the abuse issues are inherently vulnerable to adversarial attacks because they are built atop DNN-based classification models, and the literature has demonstrated that they could be bypassed by introducing pixel-level perturbations. Though corresponding mitigation has been proposed, we have identified a new attribute-variation-based adversarial attack (AVA) that perturbs the latent space via a combination of Gaussian prior and semantic discriminator to bypass such mitigation. It perturbs the semantics in the attribute space of DeepFake images, which are inconspicuous to human beings (e.g., mouth open) but can result in substantial differences in DeepFake detection. We evaluate our proposed AVA attack on nine state-of-the-art DeepFake detection algorithms and applications. The empirical results demonstrate that AVA attack defeats the state-of-the-art black box attacks against DeepFake detectors and achieves more than a 95% success rate on two commercial DeepFake detectors. Moreover, our human study indicates that AVA-generated DeepFake images are often imperceptible to humans, which presents huge security and privacy concerns.
Xiangtao Meng, Li Wang 0120, Shanqing Guo, Lei Ju 0001, Qingchuan Zhao
SP1
2024 DEEPFAKER: A Unified Evaluation Platform for Facial Deepfake and Detection Models
abstract
Deepfake data contains realistically manipulated faces—its abuses pose a huge threat to the security and privacy-critical applications. Intensive research from academia and industry has produced many deepfake/detection models, leading to a constant race of attack and defense. However, due to the lack of a unified evaluation platform, many critical questions on this subject remain largely unexplored. How is the anti-detection ability of the existing deepfake models? How generalizable are existing detection models against different deepfake samples? How effective are the detection APIs provided by the cloud-based vendors? How evasive and transferable are adversarial deepfakes in the lab and real-world environment? How do various factors impact the performance of deepfake and detection models? To bridge the gap, we design and implement DEEPFAKER 1 a unified and comprehensive deepfake detection evaluation platform. Specifically, DEEPFAKER has integrated 10 state-of-the-art deepfake methods and 9 representative detection methods, while providing a user-friendly interface and modular design that allows for easy integration of new methods. Leveraging DEEPFAKER , we conduct a large-scale empirical study of facial deepfake/detection models and draw a set of key findings: (i) the detection methods have poor generalization on samples generated by different deepfake methods; (ii) there is no significant correlation between anti-detection ability and visual quality of deepfake samples; (iii) the current detection APIs have poor detection performance and adversarial deepfakes can achieve about 70% attack success rate on all cloud-based vendors, calling for an urgent need to deploy effective and robust detection APIs; (iv) the detection methods in the lab are more robust against transfer attacks than the detection APIs in the real-world environment; and (v) deepfake videos may not always be more difficult to detect after video compression. We envision that DEEPFAKER will benefit future research on facial deepfake and detection.
Li Wang 0120, Xiangtao Meng, Xuhong Zhang 0002, Shouling Ji, Shanqing Guo
ACM Trans. Priv. Secur.2