Yukai Zhou (周宇凯)

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Biography

I am currently a first year CS Ph.D. student at ShanghaiTech University, to be fortunately advised by Prof. Wenjie Wang. Prior to that, I received my Bachelor's degree in Physics from ShanghaiTech University in 2023, and pursued the CS Master's degree from 2023 to 2025. My research interest lies in real-world AI safety issues as well as their mitigation techniques, with a specific emphasis on language model behavior control and adversarial manipulations.

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News

• [Jun. 2025] My first work DSN is accepted to ACL 2025 Findings. 🎉🎉🎉
• [Apr. 2025] Invited as a guest lecturer for CS246: Trustworthy ML course (LLM Jailbreaking).
• [Oct. 2024] Secure the first place in JailbreakBench, an open-sourced jailbreak leaderboard.
• [Oct. 2024] Secure the best white-box method in CLAS, a NeurIPS 2024 Contest.
• [Aug. 2024] Awarded "Outstanding Student" (top 10%) for 2023–2024 academic year.
• [Sep. 2023] Joined ASPIRE Lab, to begin my exploration in CS, eventually.

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Publications & Preprints

• How Jailbreak Attacks Inform Safety Alignment: A Defender-Centric, Shapley-Based Evaluation of Jailbreak Contributions
  Yukai Zhou, Feiyang Lu, Xiaokai Mao, Jinfei Liu, Wenjie Wang
  ArXiv 2026. [PDF] [Code] [Website]

• Beyond Jailbreaks: Revealing Stealthier and Broader LLM Security Risks Stemming from Alignment Failures
  Yukai Zhou, Sibei Yang, Wenjie Wang
  ArXiv 2025. [PDF] [Code] [Website] [Dataset]

• Don’t Say No: Jailbreaking LLM by Suppressing Refusal
  Yukai Zhou, Jian Lou, Zhijie Huang, Zhan Qin, Sibei Yang, Wenjie Wang
  ACL 2025 Findings. [PDF] [Code] [Blog in Chinese] [Leaderboard of JailbreakBench]

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Research Interests

• Real-world AI Safety Issues
  - Jailbreaking Attack in Large Language Models.
  - Real-world Implications for Jailbreaking.
  - Agent Safety.

• Mitigations Towards Those Safety Issues
  - Alignment & LLM Post-training.
  - Adversarial Attack & Training.
  - Defensive Techniques.

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Awards and Services

• Conference Reviewer: ACL ARR 2025, etc.
  

• Guest Lecturer: To give a lecture upon llm jailbreaking in Trustworthy ML course CS246 (April, 2, 2025)
  

• Outstanding Student: Awarded to the top 10%
  

• Teaching Assistant: Introduction to Information Science and Technology, SI100b 24Spring
  

• Undergraduate Mentor: Dadao college, Sep. 2023 - Jan. 2024