Yihe Zhang, PhD

Yihe Zhang has been a cybersecurity research scientist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette since 2024, working with Dr. Xiali (Sharon) Hei. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the same institution, supervised by Dr. Nian-Feng Tzeng and formerly advised by Dr. Xu Yuan. Before that, he received an M.S. degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 2016. His research interests span online social network security and AI security. He is a student participant in the Precise Regional Forecasting via the Intelligent and Rapid Harnessing (PREFER) program. He has received the Best Paper Award and the Distinguished Paper Award at DSN 2023.

Contact information:

Phone: (412)-726-1578
Email: yihe.zhang@louisiana.edu
Webpage https://ihozh.github.io/.

Education:
Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2024.5
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Lafayette, LA

M.S. in Computer Engineering, 2016.5
Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Publications:

• [DIMVA 25] Md Nizam Uddin, Yihe Zhang, and Xiali Hei. "Deep Learning Aided Software Vulnerability Detection: A Survey." International Conference on Detection of Intrusions and Malware, and Vulnerability Assessment, 2025.
• [IEEE TGRS 25] Yihe Zhang, Bryce Turney, Purushottam Sigdel, Xu Yuan, Eric Rappin, Adrian L. Lago, Sytske Kimball et al. "Regional Weather Variable Predictions by Machine Learning with Near-Surface Observational and Atmospheric Numerical Data." IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2025.
• [ACM SIGKDD 24] Fudong Lin, Kaleb Guillot, Summer Crawford, Yihe Zhang, Xu Yuan, and Nian-Feng Tzeng. "An Open and Large-Scale Dataset for Multi-Modal Climate Change-aware Crop Yield Predictions." 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, 2024.
• [ECML-PKDD 23] Fudong Lin, Xu Yuan, Yihe Zhang, Purushottam Sigdel, Li Chen, Lu Peng, and Nian-Feng Tzeng. "Comprehensive transformer-based model architecture for real-world storm prediction." Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, 2023.
• [IEEE/IFIP DSN 23] Jiadong Lou, Xiaohan Zhang, Yihe Zhang, Xinghua Li, Xu Yuan, and Ning Zhang. "Devils in your apps: Vulnerabilities and user privacy exposure in mobile notification systems." 53rd Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, 2023. (Best Paper Award and Distinguished Paper Award)
• [IEEE/CVF ICCV 23] Fudong Lin, Summer Crawford, Kaleb Guillot, Yihe Zhang, Yan Chen, Xu Yuan, Li Chen et al. "Mmst-vit: Climate change-aware crop yield prediction via multi-modal spatial-temporal vision transformer." IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision, 2023.
• [ACSAC 21] Yihe Zhang, Xu Yuan, and Nianfeng Tzeng. "Platform-Oblivious Anti Spam Gateway." 37th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference, 2021.
• [ACM SIGSAC CCS 21] Yihe Zhang, Xu Yuan, Jin Li, Jiadong Lou, Li Chen, and Nian Feng Tzeng. "Reverse attack: Black-box attacks on collaborative recommendation." ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2021.
• [ECML-PKDD 21] Yihe Zhang, Xu Yuan, Sytske K. Kimball, Eric Rappin, Li Chen, Paul Darby, Tom Johnsten et al. "Precise weather parameter predictions for target regions via neural networks." Joint European Conference on Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases, 2021.
• [ESORICS 20] Yihe Zhang, Jiadong Lou, Li Chen, Xu Yuan, Jin Li, Tom Johnsten, and Nian-Feng Tzeng. "Towards poisoning the neural collaborative filtering-based recommender systems." 25th European Symposium on Research in Computer Security, ESORICS, 2020.
• [IEEE TPDS 19] Xu Yuan, Xingliang Yuan, Yihe Zhang, Baochun Li, and Cong Wang. "Enabling encrypted boolean queries in geographically distributed databases." IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2019.
• [ACM AsiaCCS 19] Yihe Zhang, Hao Zhang, Xu Yuan, and Nian-Feng Tzeng. "Tweetscore: Scoring tweets via social attribute relationships for twitter spammer detection." ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security, 2019
• [IEEE/IFIP DSN 19] Yihe Zhang, Hao Zhang, Xu Yuan, and Nian-Feng Tzeng. "Pseudo-honeypot: Toward efficient and scalable spam sniffer." 49th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks, 2019.
• [ACM CODASPY 19] Yihe Zhang, Hao Zhang, and Xu Yuan. "Toward efficient spammers gathering in twitter social networks.” Ninth ACM Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy, 2019.