About Me

I am a PhD student with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE), The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, under the supervision of Prof. Haibo Hu (ASTAPLE). I received the Master’s degree in computer technology with the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 2022, under the supervision of Dr. Guyue Li. From April 2021 to September 2021, I worked as a Research Assistant with the Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, under the supervision of Prof. Bin Xiao.

Feel free to drop me an email if you want to collaborate or have a discussion!

Research interests

Physical-layer security, especially secret key generation: [IoT-J’2022], [TVT’2024]
Blockchain: [ICC’2023], [ICC’2024]
Trustworthy machine learning (Currently focused on)
- Attacks and Defenses in Model Copyright: [WWW’2025]
- Attacks and Defenses in Data Privacy: [TIFS’2025]
- Large Multi-Modal Models’ Security, Privacy, and Safety

2025.07: I am honored to receive both the International Collaborative Research Fellowship and the Research Student Attachment Programme from PolyU, supporting my 9-month research visit to NTU.
2025.06: Our paper, ProVFL: Property Inference Attacks against Vertical Federated Learning, is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security.
2025.01: Our paper, MER-Inspector: Assessing Model Extraction Risks from An Attack-Agnostic Perspective, is accepted by The ACM Web Conference (WWW) 2025.
2024.02: Our paper, Enabling Deep Learning-based Physical-layer Secret Key Generation for FDD-OFDM Systems in Multi-Environments, is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.
2024.01: Our paper, A Secure and Reliable Blockchain-based Audit Log System, is accepted by IEEE ICC’24.
2023.12: My Master’s Thesis is rated as “Excellent Master Dissertation Award of Jiangsu Province.”
2023.06: My Master’s Thesis is rated as “Excellent Master Dissertation Award of Southeast University.”
2023.01: Our paper, DBE-voting: A Privacy-preserving and Auditable Blockchain-based E-voting System, is accepted by IEEE ICC’23.

2021.09: Our paper, Deep Learning-based Physical-Layer Secret Key Generation for FDD Systems, is accepted by IEEE Internet of Things Journal.
2021.07: Our paper, Secret Key Generation for FDD Systems Based on Complex-Valued Neural Network, is accepted by IEEE VTC-2021FALL.
2021.01: Our paper, Secret Key Generation Scheme Based on Generative Adversarial Networks in FDD Systems, is accepted by IEEE INFOCOM WKSHPS.

([⋅]* is the corresponding author)

IEEE TIFS 2025

ProVFL: Property Inference Attacks against Vertical Federated Learning
Li Bai, Xinwei Zhang, Sen Zhang, Qingqing Ye, Haibo Hu*
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), vol. 20, pp. 6529-6543, 2025.
[Code] [PDF]

ACM WWW 2025

MER-Inspector: Assessing Model Extraction Risks from An Attack-Agnostic Perspective
Xinwei Zhang, Haibo Hu*, Qingqing Ye, Li Bai, Huadi Zheng
In Proc. The ACM Web Conference (WWW), 2025. (Acceptance rate=19.8%)
[Code] [PDF]

IEEE TVT 2024

Enabling Deep Learning-based Physical-layer Secret Key Generation for FDD-OFDM Systems in Multi-Environments
Xinwei Zhang, Guyue Li*, Junqing Zhang, Linning Peng, Aiqun Hu, Xianbin Wang
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT), vol. 73, no. 7, pp. 10135-10149, July 2024.

IEEE IoT-J 2022

Deep Learning-based Physical-Layer Secret Key Generation for FDD Systems
Xinwei Zhang, Guyue Li*, Junqing Zhang, Aiqun Hu, Zongyue Hou, Bin Xiao
IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT-J), vol. 9, no. 8, pp. 6081-6094, April 2022.
[code]

Research Student Attachment Programme, PolyU, 2025. (HKD 55,000)
International Collaborative Research Fellowship, PolyU, 2025. (HKD 55,000)
Excellent Master Dissertation Award of Jiangsu Province, 2023.
Excellent Master Dissertation Award of Southeast University, 2023.
Outstanding Master’s Graduate, 2022.
National Scholarship, 2021. (CNY 20,000)
Third prize of “National Big Data Creativity and Practice Competition of Electromagnetic Environment”, 2020. (CNY 10,000)
Outstanding Graduates, 2018.
University Scholarship, 2016. (CNY 1,000)

Sep. 2023- Aug. 2026 (expected), Ph.D., The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Supervisor: Prof. Haibo Hu.
Sep. 2019- June 2022, Master of Engineering, Computer Technology, Southeast University, Supervisor: Dr. Guyue Li (PLS-LAB). (Outstanding Graduates)

Teaching Assistant:
- 2023-Fall: EIE3117 Integrated Project
- 2024-Spring: EIE4118 Intrusion Detection and Penetration Test
- 2024-Fall: EIE3117 Integrated Project
- 2025-Spring: EIE3117 Integrated Project
May 2023- Aug. 2023, Research Assistant, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Supervisor: Prof. Haibo Hu.
Sep. 2022- Dec. 2022, Research Assistant, School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University (NWPU), Supervisor: Prof. Helei Cui.
Apr. 2021- Sep. 2021, Research Assistant, Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Supervisor: Prof. Bin Xiao (IEEE Fellow).