Ying Li

Ph.D. Candidate · Electrical & Computer Engineering · UCLA

Hi, this is Ying Li. I'm a Ph.D. candidate in the ECE department at UCLA, working with Prof. Yuan Tian. I received my B.E. in Cybersecurity from the School of Cyber Science and Engineering, Sichuan University, in 2021. I was a Research Assistant at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).

My research focuses on the security of AI agents and modern software systems, including LLM for Security, LLM Security/Safety, and Software Security & Privacy. My research findings have been adopted/acknowledged by Amazon, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Qwen, among others. My research is generously supported by UCLA’s Graduate Student Fellowship.

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🧭 I am actively seeking 2027 research internship opportunities in LLM Agents and Security.

News

Sep 2026Paper accepted at NeurIPS 2026, see you in Atlanta!
Aug 2026Named a USENIX Security Noteworthy Artifact Reviewer.
Jul 2026Paper accepted at ASE 2026.
Jan 2026Led one of 10 teams selected for the Amazon Nova AI Challenge ($250K award).
Sep 2025Paper accepted at IEEE S&P 2026, see you in San Francisco!

Selected Publications

Google Scholar

^* denotes equal contribution

NeurIPS 2026 MetaPI: Constructing Prompt Injection Benchmarks from Any Agent Benchmarks

Peiran Wang^*, Chong Xiang^*, Wenjie Qu, Ying Li, Jiaheng Zhang, Edwards Suh, and Yuan Tian
ASE 2026 · Industry From Security Findings to Verified Fixes: Automated Repair of Infrastructure-as-Code Misconfigurations

Ying Li, Tamjid Rahat, Yingjun Lyu, Omer Tripp, and George Argyros
IEEE S&P 2026 Breaking the Illusion: Automated Reasoning of GDPR Consent Violations

Ying Li, Wenjun Qiu, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Kunlin Cai, Michelangelo van Dam, Lisa Austin, David Lie, and Yuan Tian
PoPETs 2026 Location-Enhanced Information Flow for Home Automations

McKenna McCall, Ben Weinshel, Kunlin Cai, Ying Li, Eric Zeng, Devika Manohar, Lujo Bauer, Limin Jia, and Yuan Tian
NDSS 2026 From Perception to Protection: A Developer-Centered Study of Security and Privacy Threats in Extended Reality (XR)

Kunlin Cai, Jinghuai Zhang, Ying Li, Zhiyuan Wang, Xun Chen, Tianshi Li, and Yuan Tian
USENIX Security 2025 SoK: Towards Effective Automated Vulnerability Repair

Ying Li, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Bomin Wei, Gang Wang, and Yuan Tian

Paper
WWW 2025 Detecting and Understanding the Promotion of Illicit Goods and Services on Twitter

Hongyu Wang^*, Ying Li^*, Ronghong Huang, and Xianghang Mi

Paper
USENIX Security 2023 CarpetFuzz: Automatic Program Option Constraint Extraction from Documentation for Fuzzing

Dawei Wang, Ying Li, Zhiyu Zhang, and Kai Chen

Paper Code
CCS 2022 Clues in Tweets: Twitter-Guided Discovery and Analysis of SMS Spam

Siyuan Tang, Xianghang Mi, Ying Li, Xiaofeng Wang, and Kai Chen

Paper Code

Recent Preprints

arXiv 2026 No Attack Required: Semantic Fuzzing for Specification Violations in Agent Skills

Ying Li, Hongbo Wen, Yanju Chen, Hanzhi Liu, Yuan Tian, and Yu Feng

Paper
arXiv 2026 Options, Not Clicks: Lattice Refinement for Consent-Driven MCP Authorization

Ying Li, Yanju Chen, Peiran Wang, Issac Khabra, Faysal Hossain Shezan, Yu Feng, and Yuan Tian

Paper
arXiv 2026 Semia: Auditing Agent Skills via Constraint-Guided Representation Synthesis

Hongbo Wen, Ying Li, Hanzhi Liu, Chaofan Shou, Yanju Chen, Yuan Tian, and Yu Feng

Paper
arXiv 2026 The Landscape of Prompt Injection Threats in LLM Agents: From Taxonomy to Analysis

Peiran Wang, Xinfeng Li, Chong Xiang, Jinghuai Zhang, Ying Li, Lixia Zhang, Xiaofeng Wang, and Yuan Tian

Paper

Awards & Honors

Amazon Nova AI Challenge, team lead, $250,000 award, 2026
UCLA Graduate Student Fellowship, UCLA, 2025–2026
USENIX Security: Noteworthy Artifact Reviewer (2026), Distinguished Artifact Reviewer (2025)
Student Travel Grants, USENIX Security (2025) and NDSS (2024)
OpenAI Researcher Access Program, OpenAI, 2024
Student Mentee, ACM CCS, 2023
Outstanding Undergraduate Award, Sichuan Province, 2021

Employment

Jun – Sep 2026Applied Scientist Intern, AWS.
Jun – Sep 2025Applied Scientist Intern, AWS.
Jun – Sep 2023Research Assistant, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Services

Program CommitteesAsiaCCS ’26, NeurIPS ’25–26; AEC for USENIX Security ’25–26, PoPETs ’25, ACM CCS ’23–24, ISSTA ’24; MSR Junior PC ’24.
External ReviewerIEEE S&P ’24–25; USENIX Security ’24.
Leadership & TeachingLACC Coordinator ’24; Teaching Assistant for Computer Security (UCLA ECE 117 / CS 38).

Misc

my cats