Haonan Shi

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503 Olin, 2001–2017 Martin Luther King Jr Dr

Cleveland, OH 44106

United States

I am a third-year Ph.D. candidate at Case Western Reserve University, advised by Prof. An Wang and co-advised by Dr. Tu Ouyang. My research focuses on Large Language Models Safety and Machine Learning Privacy.

Prior to this, I received my bachelor’s degree from South China University of Technology, where I conducted research on privacy under the supervision of Prof. Hongyun Xu.

I am passionate about applying my research to real-world problems and look forward to internship opportunities and research collaborations.

Email: haonan.shi3[AT]case.edu(please replace “[AT]” by “@”)

research interests

My research lies at the intersection of Machine Learning Safety(Security) and Privacy. Specifically, the focus areas include:

Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning: Developing effective and efficient methods to detect privacy vulnerabilities in machine learning models and systems through membership inference attacks [EuroS&P, PoPETs]. Also investigating privacy-preserving fine-tuning approaches for large language models [WWW].

Large Language Model Safety: Exploring reasoning-enhanced safety alignment methods that effectively detect and defend against jailbreak attacks while preserving both inference-time efficiency and model performance [Under Review].

news

selected publications

  1. Learning-Based Difficulty Calibration for Enhanced Membership Inference Attacks
    Haonan Shi, Tu Ouyang, and An Wang
    In IEEE 9th European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P), 2024
  2. WWW
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    Navigating the Designs of Privacy-Preserving Fine-tuning for Large Language Models
    Haonan Shi, Tu Ouyang, and An Wang
    In International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 2025
  3. Unveiling Client Privacy Leakage from Public Dataset Usage in Federated Distillation
    Haonan Shi, Tu Ouyang, and An Wang
    In Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PoPETs), 2025