About Me

I am Yudong Zhang (张宇东), currently a Pre-training Algorithm Researcher at Baidu ERNIE Team.

I earned my Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree from the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University in 2026 under the supervision of Professor Yu Wang (汪玉), affiliated with the NICS-EFC Laboratory. I received my Bachelor’s degree from the same department in 2020, supervised by Professor Jiansheng Chen (陈健生).

My research focuses on large language model pre-training and the safety and efficiency of vision-language models. I have published 10+ papers at top academic conferences such as AAAI, ACM-MM, EMNLP and NAACL. My total Google Scholar citation count is .

If you are interested in academic collaboration or wish to explore potential research opportunities, please feel free to contact me via email.

📖 Education

• 2020.09 - 2026.06, Ph.D. student, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing.
• 2016.09 - 2020.06, B.S. student, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing.

🔥 News

• 2026.06: I was named a Beijing Outstanding Graduate.
• 2025.05: I was featured by Tsinghua University on Twitter and Facebook. For details: Twitter 1, Twitter 2, Twitter 3, Facebook.

• 2025.04: I was awarded the Excellent Intern Award from the Machine Learning Platform Department, Tencent Technology and Engineering Group (TEG).

• 2024.12: I was named Tsinghua University 2024 Student of the Year.

💻 Work / Internships

• 2026.07 - Present, Baidu, Basic Model Research and Development Department (BMU), LLM Pre-training Department (Algorithm Group) , AIDU Talent Program, Beijing.
• [Intern] 2026.05 - 2026.07, JD.com, JD Retail - Platform Products & R&D Center , TGT Program Intern, Beijing.
• [Intern] 2024.04 - 2026.05, Tencent, TEG Large Language Model Department, LLM Pre-training Group , Qingyun Program Intern, Beijing. I was mentored by Xingwu Sun (孙兴武) and Ruobing Xie (谢若冰). I worked primarily on the pre-training of large language models.
• [Intern] 2023.07 - 2024.01, Infinigence, Infrastructure Group , Beijing.
• [Intern] 2021.07 - 2021.08, Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, China Education Television (CETV) , Beijing.
• [Intern] 2019.07 - 2019.08, MEGVII Research Institute , Beijing.

📝 Publications

(* indicates equal contribution, † indicates corresponding authors.)

First-author Publications

• ACM-MM 2024 (Oral) PIP: Detecting Adversarial Examples in Large Vision-Language Models via Attention Patterns of Irrelevant Probe Questions, Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie†, Jiansheng Chen†, Xingwu Sun, Yu Wang† | Code | Video

• NAACL 2025 QAVA: Query-Agnostic Visual Attack to Large Vision-Language Models, Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie†, Jiansheng Chen†, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Yu Wang† | Code | Video

• ACM-MM 2025 DHCP: Detecting Hallucinations by Cross-modal Attention Pattern in Large Vision-Language Models, Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie†, Xingwu Sun, Yiqing Huang, Jiansheng Chen†, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Yu Wang† | Code | Video

• ACM-MM 2025 (Oral) Fighting Fire with Fire (F3): A Training-free and Efficient Visual Adversarial Example Purification Method in LVLMs, Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie†, Yiqing Huang, Jiansheng Chen†, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Yu Wang† | Code | Video

• EMNLP 2025 (Findings) The Security Threat of Compressed Projectors in Large Vision-Language Models, Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie†, Xingwu Sun, Jiansheng Chen†, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Yu Wang† | Code | Video

• AAAI 2025 Enhancing Contrastive Learning Inspired by the Philosophy of “the Blind Men and the Elephant”, Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie†, Jiansheng Chen†, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Yu Wang† | Code | Video

First-author Preprints

• Preprint A Survey of Linear Attention: Algorithm, Theory, Application, and Infrastructure, Yudong Zhang*, Weixuan Sun*, Xingwu Sun, Wei Ding, Ruiqi Xie, Hongyi Wang, Junjie Chen, Jiacheng Liu, Shaobo Wang, Yuwei Zhang, Yiqing Huang, Jiaming Wang, Tianchen Zhao, Weidong Han, Yanfeng Chen, Kai Zhang, Shuaipeng Li, Ruobing Xie†, Di Wang, Jiansheng Chen, Linfeng Zhang†, Chengzhong Xu, Yu Wang† | Code

• Preprint Beyond Encoder Accumulation: Measuring Encoder Roles in Multi-Encoder VLMs, Wei Ding*, Yudong Zhang*†, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Jiansheng Chen, Yu Wang†

• Preprint MHSA: A Lightweight Framework for Mitigating Hallucinations via Steered Attention in LVLMs, Wei Ding*, Yilin Li*, Yudong Zhang*†, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Jiansheng Chen, Yu Wang†

Co-authored Publications and Preprints

• ACM-MM 2022 3D Human Mesh Reconstruction by Learning to Sample Joint Adaptive Tokens for Transformers, Youze Xue, Jiansheng Chen, Yudong Zhang, Cheng Yu, Huimin Ma, Hongbing Ma

• CIKM 2023 Transferable Structure-based Adversarial Attack of Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network, Yu Shang, Yudong Zhang, Jiansheng Chen, Depeng Jin, Yong Li

• AAAI 2024 Step Vulnerability Guided Mean Fluctuation Adversarial Attack against Conditional Diffusion Models, Hongwei Yu, Jiansheng Chen, Xinlong Ding, Yudong Zhang, Ting Tang, Huimin Ma

• Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) Image paragraph captioning with topic clustering and topic shift prediction, Ting Tang, Jiansheng Chen, Yiqing Huang, Huimin Ma, Yudong Zhang, Hongwei Yu

• ICCV 2025 DADet: Safeguarding Image Conditional Diffusion Models against Adversarial and Backdoor Attacks via Diffusion Anomaly Detection, Hongwei Yu, Xinlong Ding, Jiawei Li, Jinlong Wang, Yudong Zhang, Rongquan Wang, Huimin Ma, Jiansheng Chen

• CVPR 2026 Task-Oriented Data Synthesis and Control-Rectify Sampling for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation, Yunkai Yang, Yudong Zhang, Kunquan Zhang, Jinxiao Zhang, Xinying Chen, Haohuan Fu, Runmin Dong

• Preprint Towards a Comprehensive Scaling Law of Mixture-of-Experts, Guoliang Zhao, Yuhan Fu, Shuaipeng Li, Xingwu Sun, Ruobing Xie, An Wang, Weidong Han, Zhen Yang, Weixuan Sun, Yudong Zhang, Cheng-zhong Xu, Di Wang, Jie Jiang

🎖 Honors and Awards

Highlighted Honors

• 2025.04 Excellent Intern Award, Machine Learning Platform Department, Tencent TEG
• 2024.12 Tsinghua University 2024 Student of the Year (up to 10 recipients per year)
• 2026.06 Beijing Outstanding Graduate
• 2023.12 Tsinghua University Lin Feng Counselor Award (the highest honor for “Double-Role” (student-cum-counselor) Political Counselors at Tsinghua University)
• 2018.12 Tsinghua University Jiang Nanxiang Scholarship (the highest scholarship for junior undergraduates at Tsinghua University)
• 2025.12 Tsinghua University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award (up to 10 recipients per year)
• 2023.10 Tsinghua University Outstanding Student Leader Award (Exemplary) (up to 30 recipients per year)
• 2019.11 Tsinghua University Top 10 Volunteers (up to 10 recipients every two years)
• 2024.12 Feng Chongxi Outstanding Scientific Research Scholarship, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University
• 2025.04 First-Class and Third-Class Awards (as primary contributor) of the 35th Tsinghua University Student Laboratory Construction Contribution Award

Other Honors

• 2022.12 Tsinghua University “December 9th” Counselor Award
• 2024.12 Graduate Student “Electronic Star”, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University (up to 5 recipients per year)
• 2019.12 Undergraduate Student “Electronic Star”, Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University (up to 5 recipients per year)
• 2025.10 Lu Dajin and Liu Runsheng Excellent Teaching Assistant Award (Grand Prize), Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University
• 2022.10 Lu Dajin and Liu Runsheng Excellent Teaching Assistant Award (Grand Prize), Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University
• Tsinghua University Comprehensive Excellent Scholarship (twice during undergraduate studies, five times during doctoral studies)
• Tsinghua University Technological Innovation Excellence Award, Volunteer and Public Welfare Excellence Award, Social Work Excellence Award (twice), Tsinghua Friends - YOFC (Changfei) Scholarship (First-Class and Second-Class)
• 2020.10, 2021.10, 2022.10 Tsinghua University Outstanding Student Leader Award (three-time recipient)
• 2020.09 As the team leader, I led the Tsinghua University Science and Technology Service Team to win the Tan Haoqiang Computer Education Foundation Scholarship - Excellent Student Group Award

🔧 Patents

Chinese Patents (Granted)

• Kubernetes Container Access Method, Device, Computing Device, and Storage Medium (Patent No.: CN118041704B), Yu Wang, Yudong Zhang.

• Distributed Task Dynamic Service Discovery Method, Device, and Task Training System (Patent No.: CN118041866B), Yu Wang, Yudong Zhang.

• Sample Purification Method, Device, Equipment, and Medium (Patent No.: CN118865024B), Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang.
• Model Hallucination Detection Method, Device, Equipment, Storage Medium, and Program Product (Patent No.: CN118887474B), Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang.
• Text Generation Method, Device, Equipment, and Readable Storage Medium (Patent No.: CN118865423B), Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang.

Chinese Patents (Pending)

• Adversarial Sample Image Generation Method, Device, Computer Equipment, and Storage Medium (Publication No.: CN121459011A), Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang.
• Image Processing Method and Related Equipment (Publication No.: CN121482522A), Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang.
• Image Processing Method, Device, Equipment, Readable Storage Medium, and Program Product (Publication No.: CN121526893A), Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang.
• Attention Processing Method, Device, Computer Equipment, Medium, and Product (Application No.: 202610581625.4), Yudong Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Xingwu Sun.

🧑‍🏫 Teaching

Teaching assistant for the course “Data and Algorithms” in the Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University

• Spring 2021 – Spring 2026

✍️ Academic Service

Conference and Journal Reviewing

• ARR (ACL/EMNLP/NAACL)
• CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, BMVC
• ICLR, NeurIPS, AAAI, ACM-MM
• Pattern Recognition
• Transactions on Information Forensics & Security