Dezhang Kong
Author directory2026
TTS-Guard: Black-Box Ownership Verification of Text-to-Speech Models via Adaptive Adversarial Speaker-Pair Fingerprints
Xubin Yue | Zhenhua Xu | Zhebo Wang | Mengting Li | Zijie Zhou | Wenpeng Xing | Dezhang Kong | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xubin Yue | Zhenhua Xu | Zhebo Wang | Mengting Li | Zijie Zhou | Wenpeng Xing | Dezhang Kong | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
The rapid maturation of zero-shot Text-to-Speech (TTS) models has turned high-quality voice cloning into a widely available capability, raising acute concerns over unauthorised replication, fine-tuning and resale of proprietary speech models. Yet ownership verification for TTS remains largely open: speech is a continuous waveform whose perturbations are easily destroyed by routine signal processing, and the human auditory system imposes a much tighter perceptual budget than vision. We present TTS-Guard, a black-box ownership verification framework for TTS models built on adversarial speaker-pair fingerprints. TTS-Guard(i) selects key speaker pairs in a dual embedding space for architecture-agnostic stealth;(ii) optimises a perturbation through an adaptive curriculum of shadow models covering fine-tuning, pruning, quantisation and distillation; and (iii) aggregates black-box queries into a calibrated Verification Confidence Score. On five mainstream TTS systems, TTS-Guard reaches an average Fingerprint Success Rate of 96.4% at a False Positive Rate of 5.8%, while preserving intelligibility and naturalness. The fingerprint remains effective against ten audio attacks, six model modifications, and two state-of-the-art adversarial purifiers.
MalURLBench: A Benchmark Evaluating Agents’ Vulnerabilities When Processing Web URLs
Dezhang Kong | Zhuxi Wu | Shiqi Liu | ZhiCheng Tan | Kuichen Lu | Minghao Li | Qichen Liu | Shengyu Chu | Zhenhua Xu | Xuan Liu | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Dezhang Kong | Zhuxi Wu | Shiqi Liu | ZhiCheng Tan | Kuichen Lu | Minghao Li | Qichen Liu | Shengyu Chu | Zhenhua Xu | Xuan Liu | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
LLM-based web agents have become increasingly popular for their utility in daily life and work. However, they exhibit critical vulnerabilities when processing malicious URLs: accepting a disguised malicious URL enables subsequent access to unsafe webpages, which can cause severe damage to service providers and users. Despite this risk, no benchmark currently targets this emerging threat. To address this gap, we propose MalURLBench, the first benchmark for evaluating LLMs’ vulnerabilities to malicious URLs. MalURLBench contains 61,845 attack instances spanning 10 real-world scenarios and 7 categories of real malicious websites. Experiments with 12 popular LLMs reveal that existing models struggle to detect elaborately disguised malicious URLs. We further identify and analyze key factors that impact attack success rates and propose URLGuard, a lightweight defense module. We believe this work will provide a foundational resource for advancing the security of web agents.
Web Fraud Attacks Against LLM-Driven Multi-Agent Systems
Dezhang Kong | Hujin Peng | Yilun Zhang | Lele Zhao | Zhenhua Xu | Shi Lin | Changting Lin | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Dezhang Kong | Hujin Peng | Yilun Zhang | Lele Zhao | Zhenhua Xu | Shi Lin | Changting Lin | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
With the proliferation of LLM-driven multi-agent systems (MAS), the security of Web links has become a critical concern. Once MAS is induced to trust a malicious link, attackers can use it as a springboard to expand the attack surface. In this paper, we propose Web Fraud Attacks, a novel type of attack manipulating unique structures of web links to deceive MAS. We design 12 representative attack variants that encompass various methods, such as homoglyph deception, sub-directory nesting, and parameter obfuscation. Through extensive experiments on these attack vectors, we demonstrate that Web fraud attacks not only exhibit significant destructive potential across different MAS architectures but also possess a distinct advantage in evasion: they circumvent the need for complex input design, lowering the threshold for attacks significantly. These results underscore the importance of addressing Web fraud attacks, providing new insights into MAS safety.
Policy of Thoughts: Scaling LLM Reasoning via Test-time Policy Evolution
Zhengbo Jiao | Hongyu Xian | Qinglong Wang | Yunpu Ma | Zhebo Wang | Dezhang Kong | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhengbo Jiao | Hongyu Xian | Qinglong Wang | Yunpu Ma | Zhebo Wang | Dezhang Kong | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Large language models (LLMs) struggle with complex, long-horizon reasoning due to instability from the frozen-policy assumption. Current test-time scaling methods treat execution feedback merely as an external signal for filtering or rewriting trajectories, without internalizing it to improve reasoning strategies. Inspired by Popper’s “conjectures and refutations,” we posit that effective reasoning requires real-time policy adaptation through learning from failures. We introduce Policy of Thoughts (PoT), a framework that recasts reasoning as a within-instance online optimization process. PoT effectively generates diverse candidates via targeted exploration, then applies Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to update a transient LoRA adapter using execution feedback. This closed-loop design enables dynamic, instance-specific refinement of reasoning priors. Experiments demonstrate PoT’s substantial gains across multiple benchmarks. On LiveCodeBench, a 4B model achieves 49.71% accuracy, surpassing 12 test-time scaling baselines and commercial models (e.g., GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3) despite being over 50 smaller.