Zhenhua Xu
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.
AdaMARP: An Adaptive Multi-Agent Interaction Framework for General Immersive Role-Playing
Zhenhua Xu | Dongsheng Chen | Shuo Wang | Jian Li | Chengjie Wang | Meng Han | Yabiao Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Zhenhua Xu | Dongsheng Chen | Shuo Wang | Jian Li | Chengjie Wang | Meng Han | Yabiao Wang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
LLM role-playing seeks to portray arbitrary characters in interactive narratives, yet existing systems often lack immersion and adapt ability. They typically under-model dynamic environment information and assume a largely static scene/cast, offering limited support for multi-character orchestration, scene transitions, and on-the-fly character introduction. We propose an adaptive multi-agent interaction framework dubbed AdaMARP, which featuring an immersive message format that interleaves [Thought], (Action), Environment, and Speech, and an explicit Scene Manager that controls role-playing via discrete actions (init_scene, pick_speaker, switch_scene, add_role, end) with rationales. To train these abilities, we construct AdaRPSet for the Actor Model and AdaSMSet for supervising or chestration decisions, and introduce AdaptiveBench for trajectory-level evaluation. Experiments across multiple backbones and scales show consistent gains: AdaRPSet improves character consistency, environment grounding, and narrative coherence—an 8B actor outperforming several commercial LLMs, while AdaSMSet enables smoother scene transitions and more natural role introductions, surpassing Claude Sonnet 4.5 with only 14B LLMs.
SRAF: Stealthy and Robust Adversarial Fingerprint for Copyright Verification of Large Language Models
Zhebo Wang | Zhenhua Xu | Li Maike | Xilong Cheng | Wenpeng Xing | Chunqiang Hu | Chen Zhi | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhebo Wang | Zhenhua Xu | Li Maike | Xilong Cheng | Wenpeng Xing | Chunqiang Hu | Chen Zhi | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The protection of Intellectual Property (IP) for Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a critical concern as model theft and unauthorized commercialization escalate. While adversarial fingerprinting offers a promising black-box solution for ownership verification, existing methods suffer from significant limitations: they are fragile against downstream model modifications, sensitive to system prompt variations, and easily detectable due to high-perplexity input patterns. In this paper, we propose SRAF, a stealthy and robust adversarial fingerprinting framework. SRAF employs a synergistic joint optimization strategy across homologous model variants and diverse chat templates, forcing the fingerprint to anchor onto the invariant intrinsic comprehension features of the model family. Furthermore, we introduce a Perplexity Hiding technique that embeds adversarial perturbations within Markdown tables, effectively aligning the prompt’s statistics with natural language to evade perplexity-based detection. Extensive experiments across multiple model families and parameter scales demonstrate that SRAF significantly enhances robustness against fine-tuning, alignment, pruning, merging, and input perturbations while maintaining exceptional stealthiness and low false-positive rates, offering a practical and resilient black-box solution for LLM ownership verification.
2025
Unlocking the Effectiveness of LoRA-FP for Seamless Transfer Implantation of Fingerprints in Downstream Models
Zhenhua Xu | Zhaokun Yan | Binhan Xu | Xin Tong | Haitao Xu | Yourong Chen | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Zhenhua Xu | Zhaokun Yan | Binhan Xu | Xin Tong | Haitao Xu | Yourong Chen | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
With the rapid development of large language models (LLMs), protecting intellectual property (IP) has become increasingly crucial. To tackle high costs and potential contamination in fingerprint integration, we propose LoRA-FP, a lightweight plug-and-play framework that encodes backdoor fingerprints into LoRA adapters via constrained fine-tuning. This enables seamless fingerprint transplantation through parameter fusion, eliminating full-parameter updates while maintaining integrity. Experiments demonstrate that LoRA-FP achieves superior robustness against various scenarios like incremental training and model fusion, while significantly reducing computational overhead compared to traditional approaches.
PREE: Towards Harmless and Adaptive Fingerprint Editing in Large Language Models via Knowledge Prefix Enhancement
Xubin Yue | Zhenhua Xu | Wenpeng Xing | Jiahui Yu | Mohan Li | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Xubin Yue | Zhenhua Xu | Wenpeng Xing | Jiahui Yu | Mohan Li | Meng Han
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Addressing the intellectual property protection challenges in commercial deployment of large language models (LLMs), existing black-box fingerprinting techniques face dual challenges from incremental fine-tuning erasure and feature-space defense due to their reliance on overfitting high-perplexity trigger patterns. We firstly reveal that, model editing in the fingerprint domain exhibits unique advantages including significantly lower false positive rates, enhanced harmlessness, and superior robustness. Building on this foundation, this paper innovatively proposes a Prefix-enhanced Fingerprint Editing Framework (PREE), which encodes copyright information into parameter offsets through dual-channel knowledge edit to achieve covert embedding of fingerprint features. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves the 90% trigger precision in mainstream architectures including LLaMA-3 and Qwen-2.5. The minimal parameter offset (change rate < 0.03) effectively preserves original knowledge representation while demonstrating strong robustness against incremental fine-tuning and multi-dimensional defense strategies, maintaining zero false positive rate throughout evaluations.
EverTracer: Hunting Stolen Large Language Models via Stealthy and Robust Probabilistic Fingerprint
Zhenhua Xu | Meng Han | Wenpeng Xing
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhenhua Xu | Meng Han | Wenpeng Xing
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has intensified concerns over model theft and license violations, necessitating robust and stealthy ownership verification. Existing fingerprinting methods either require impractical white-box access or introduce detectable statistical anomalies. We propose EverTracer, a novel gray-box fingerprinting framework that ensures stealthy and robust model provenance tracing. EverTracer is the first to repurpose Membership Inference Attacks (MIAs) for defensive use, embedding ownership signals via memorization instead of artificial trigger-output overfitting. It consists of Fingerprint Injection, which fine-tunes the model on any natural language data without detectable artifacts, and Verification, which leverages calibrated probability variation signal to distinguish fingerprinted models. This approach remains robust against adaptive adversaries, including input level modification, and model-level modifications. Extensive experiments across architectures demonstrate EverTracer’s state-of-the-art effectiveness, stealthness, and resilience, establishing it as a practical solution for securing LLM intellectual property.
CTCC: A Robust and Stealthy Fingerprinting Framework for Large Language Models via Cross-Turn Contextual Correlation Backdoor
Zhenhua Xu | Xixiang Zhao | Xubin Yue | Shengwei Tian | Changting Lin | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Zhenhua Xu | Xixiang Zhao | Xubin Yue | Shengwei Tian | Changting Lin | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
The widespread deployment of large language models (LLMs) has intensified concerns around intellectual property (IP) protection, as model theft and unauthorized redistribution become increasingly feasible. To address this, model fingerprinting aims to embed verifiable ownership traces into LLMs. However, existing methods face inherent trade-offs between stealthness, robustness, and generalizability—being either detectable via distributional shifts, vulnerable to adversarial modifications, or easily invalidated once the fingerprint is revealed. In this work, we introduce CTCC, a novel rule-driven fingerprinting framework that encodes contextual correlations across multiple dialogue turns—such as counterfactual—rather than relying on token-level or single-turn triggers. CTCC enables fingerprint verification under black-box access while mitigating false positives and fingerprint leakage, supporting continuous construction under a shared semantic rule even if partial triggers are exposed. Extensive experiments across multiple LLM architectures demonstrate that CTCC consistently achieves stronger stealth and robustness than prior work. Our findings position CTCC as a reliable and practical solution for ownership verification in real-world LLM deployment scenarios.
MEraser: An Effective Fingerprint Erasure Approach for Large Language Models
Jingxuan Zhang | Zhenhua Xu | Rui Hu | Wenpeng Xing | Xuhong Zhang | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Jingxuan Zhang | Zhenhua Xu | Rui Hu | Wenpeng Xing | Xuhong Zhang | Meng Han
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent across various sectors, raising critical concerns about model ownership and intellectual property protection. Although backdoor-based fingerprinting has emerged as a promising solution for model authentication, effective attacks for removing these fingerprints remain largely unexplored. Therefore, We present Mismatched Eraser (MEraser), a novel method for effectively removing backdoor-based fingerprints from LLMs while maintaining model performance. Our approach leverages a two-phase fine-tuning strategy utilizing carefully constructed mismatched and clean datasets. Through extensive evaluation across multiple LLM architectures and fingerprinting methods, we demonstrate that MEraser achieves complete fingerprinting removal while maintaining model performance with minimal training data of fewer than 1,000 samples. Furthermore, we introduce a transferable erasure mechanism that enables effective fingerprinting removal across different models without repeated training. In conclusion, our approach provides a practical solution for fingerprinting removal in LLMs, reveals critical vulnerabilities in current fingerprinting techniques, and establishes comprehensive evaluation benchmarks for developing more resilient model protection methods in the future.
Search
Fix author
Co-authors
- Meng Han 10
- Wenpeng Xing 5
- Dezhang Kong 3
- Xubin Yue 3
- Changting Lin 2
- Zhebo Wang 2
- Dongsheng Chen 1
- Yourong Chen 1
- Xilong Cheng 1
- Shengyu Chu 1
- Chunqiang Hu 1
- Rui Hu 1
- Jian Li 1
- Mengting Li 1
- Minghao Li 1
- Mohan Li 1
- Shi Lin 1
- Qichen Liu 1
- Shiqi Liu 1
- Xuan Liu 1
- Kuichen Lu 1
- Li Maike 1
- Hujin Peng 1
- ZhiCheng Tan 1
- Shengwei Tian 1
- Xin Tong 1
- Chengjie Wang 1
- Shuo Wang 1
- Yabiao Wang 1
- Zhuxi Wu 1
- Binhan Xu 1
- Haitao Xu 1
- Zhaokun Yan 1
- Jiahui Yu 1
- Jingxuan Zhang 1
- Xuhong Zhang 1
- Yilun Zhang 1
- Lele Zhao 1
- Xixiang Zhao 1
- Chen Zhi 1
- Zijie Zhou 1