Renyang Liu
Publications
Mastermind: Strategy-grounded Learning for Repository-Scale Vulnerability Reproduction
Repository-level vulnerability reproduction is a demanding software engineering (SE) task: an agent must inspect a codebase, infer the input grammar that reaches a vulnerable path, construct a proof-of-conceptv(PoC), and verify that the crash disappears on the patched build. Recent LLM agents can often execute these steps when the approach is correct, yet they still fail by choosing the wrong strategy. This paper argues that strategy, rather than the full action trajectory, is the right learning unit for such SE agents: it is compact enough to optimize, concrete enough to guide execution, and stable enough to store and reuse across attempts. We present Mastermind, a dual-loop framework that separates transferable strategy learning from task-specific experience. A trainable planner learns reusable vulnerability-reproduction strategies through SFT and milestone-based GRPO, while an experience loop maintains task-local strategy records that guide subsequent attempts. The planner is trained independently of the executor, allowing strategy learning to improve multiple frozen executors without modifying their action-generation capability. We evaluate Mastermind on CyberGym using 260 training tasks and 200 held-out evaluation tasks. With GPT-5.5 as the frozen executor, Mastermind achieves an 84.5% pass rate, outperforming open-book PoC context (60.0%), Best-of-8 sampling (63.0%), and iterative improvement (77.0%). The same planner also improves GPT-5.4 mini and GLM~5.1 from 45.0% and 58.5% to 60.0% and 71.0%. These results demonstrate that learning high-level strategies is an effective and transferable mechanism for improving repository-scale SE agents.
CAAP: Capture-Aware Adversarial Patch Attacks on Palmprint Recognition Models
Palmprint recognition is deployed in security-critical applications, including access control and palm-based payment, due to its contactless acquisition and highly discriminative ridge-and-crease textures. However, the robustness of deep palmprint recognition systems against physically realizable attacks remains insufficiently understood. Existing studies are largely confined to the digital setting and do not adequately account for the texture-dominant nature of palmprint recognition or the distortions introduced during physical acquisition. To address this gap, we propose CAAP, a capture-aware adversarial patch framework for palmprint recognition. CAAP learns a universal patch that can be reused across inputs while remaining effective under realistic acquisition variation. To match the structural characteristics of palmprints, the framework adopts a cross-shaped patch topology, which enlarges spatial coverage under a fixed pixel budget and more effectively disrupts long-range texture continuity. CAAP further integrates three modules: ASIT for input-conditioned patch rendering, RaS for stochastic capture-aware simulation, and MS-DIFE for feature-level identity-disruptive guidance. We evaluate CAAP on the Tongji, IITD, and AISEC datasets against generic CNN backbones and palmprint-specific recognition models. Experiments show that CAAP achieves strong untargeted and targeted attack performance with favorable cross-model and cross-dataset transferability. The results further show that, although adversarial training can partially reduce the attack success rate, substantial residual vulnerability remains. These findings indicate that deep palmprint recognition systems remain vulnerable to physically realizable, capture-aware adversarial patch attacks, underscoring the need for more effective defenses in practice. Code available at https://github.com/ryliu68/CAAP.
REFORGE: Multi-modal Attacks Reveal Vulnerable Concept Unlearning in Image Generation Models
Recent progress in image generation models (IGMs) enables high-fidelity content creation but also amplifies risks, including the reproduction of copyrighted content and the generation of offensive content. Image Generation Model Unlearning (IGMU) mitigates these risks by removing harmful concepts without full retraining. Despite growing attention, the robustness under adversarial inputs, particularly image-side threats in black-box settings, remains underexplored. To bridge this gap, we present REFORGE, a black-box red-teaming framework that evaluates IGMU robustness via adversarial image prompts. REFORGE initializes stroke-based images and optimizes perturbations with a cross-attention-guided masking strategy that allocates noise to concept-relevant regions, balancing attack efficacy and visual fidelity. Extensive experiments across representative unlearning tasks and defenses demonstrate that REFORGE significantly improves attack success rate while achieving stronger semantic alignment and higher efficiency than involved baselines. These results expose persistent vulnerabilities in current IGMU methods and highlight the need for robustness-aware unlearning against multi-modal adversarial attacks. Our code is at: https://github.com/Imfatnoily/REFORGE.
SafeRedir: Prompt Embedding Redirection for Robust Unlearning in Image Generation Models
Image generation models (IGMs), while capable of producing impressive and creative content, often memorize a wide range of undesirable concepts from their training data, leading to the reproduction of unsafe content such as NSFW imagery and copyrighted artistic styles. Such behaviors pose persistent safety and compliance risks in real-world deployments and cannot be reliably mitigated by post-hoc filtering, owing to the limited robustness of such mechanisms and a lack of fine-grained semantic control. Recent unlearning methods seek to erase harmful concepts at the model level, which exhibit the limitations of requiring costly retraining, degrading the quality of benign generations, or failing to withstand prompt paraphrasing and adversarial attacks. To address these challenges, we introduce SafeRedir, a lightweight inference-time framework for robust unlearning via prompt embedding redirection. Without modifying the underlying IGMs, SafeRedir adaptively routes unsafe prompts toward safe semantic regions through token-level interventions in the embedding space. The framework comprises two core components: a latent-aware multi-modal safety classifier for identifying unsafe generation trajectories, and a token-level delta generator for precise semantic redirection, equipped with auxiliary predictors for token masking and adaptive scaling to localize and regulate the intervention. Empirical results across multiple representative unlearning tasks demonstrate that SafeRedir achieves effective unlearning capability, high semantic and perceptual preservation, robust image quality, and enhanced resistance to adversarial attacks. Furthermore, SafeRedir generalizes effectively across a variety of diffusion backbones and existing unlearned models, validating its plug-and-play compatibility and broad applicability. Code and data are available at https://github.com/ryliu68/SafeRedir.