Yifei Zhao

Biography

I am a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Central Florida, co-advised by Prof. Mengxin Zheng and Prof. Qian Lou. My research focuses on secure and trustworthy AI systems, including coding and multi-agent systems, intellectual property protection for AI agents, LLM routing, and on-device model verification.

Education

• University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL
  Ph.D. in Computer Science, Aug 2024 - Present
• University of Washington, Seattle, WA
  M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sep 2023 - Jun 2024

Technical Skills

• Agent Frameworks: NVIDIA NeMo Agent Toolkit, AWS Strands Agents SDK, LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI
• Agentic Systems: SWE-agent, multi-agent orchestration, LLM routing, sandboxed execution, MCP, RAG
• ML Systems: PyTorch, vLLM, llama.cpp

Research Publications

• SIF: Semantically In-Distribution Fingerprints for Large Vision-Language Models
  Yifei Zhao, Qian Lou, Mengxin Zheng

  IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2026

  TL;DR: Distilled decoding watermarks into natural visual queries for stealthy, robust black-box LVLM ownership verification.
• AttestLLM: Efficient Attestation Framework for Billion-scale On-device LLMs
  Ruisi Zhang*, Yifei Zhao*, Neusha Javidnia, Mengxin Zheng, Farinaz Koushanfar

  Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2026

  TL;DR: Verified on-device LLM integrity through randomized, layer-wise watermark checks inside a TEE.
• REALM: A Unified Red-Teaming Benchmark for Physical-World VLMs
  Yifei Zhao, Qian Lou, Mengxin Zheng

  preprint, 2026

  TL;DR: Built an agentic target-generation pipeline that aligns heterogeneous physical-world VLM attacks through shared, scene-specific targets.
• PRO: Enabling Precise and Robust Text Watermark for Open-Source LLMs
  Jiaqi Xue*, Yifei Zhao*, Mansour Al Ghanim, Shangqian Gao, Ruimin Sun, Qian Lou, Mengxin Zheng

  preprint, 2025

  TL;DR: Enabled open-source LLMs to natively generate watermarked text that remains detectable under downstream model modifications.

Project

• AIDE-FHE: Autonomous Fully Homomorphic Encryption Challenge Solver (2026)
  Built an FHE coding-agent evaluation pipeline with execution-guided tree search over compiled and graded OpenFHE solutions.

Experience

• University of Central Florida
  Teaching Assistant - COP3402: System Software (Aug 2025 - Present)
  Mentored 130+ students in C systems programming and compiler fundamentals.

Honors and Awards

• ORCGS Doctoral Fellowship, University of Central Florida, 2024