About Me

I am a second-year CS Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), advised by Prof. Xiaojing Liao. My research focuses on the intersection of AI and security. Specifically, I am interested in

• understanding adversarial attacks on LLMs through mechanistic interpretability,
• enhancing LLMs and agentic systems, and
• building agentic systems to solve cybersecurity problems.

Previously, I received my B.E. and M.S. degrees from Tsinghua University. I served as a volunteer middle school teacher in Xinjiang, Tibet, Shanxi, and Fujian, China.

I am thinking hard about how AI will change cybersecurity recently. Please reach out if you have similar interest!

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News

• Aug. 2026 - Attended BlueDot Context Week at Berkeley.
• Jun. 2026 - Joined the Second Look AI Safety Program.
• Sep. 2025 - Awarded the Wing Kai Cheng Fellowship at UIUC!
• Aug. 2025 - Started my Ph.D. studies in Computer Science at UIUC!
• Jun. 2025 - Completed my M.S. degree at Tsinghua University.

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Publications

• Execution-State-Aware LLM Reasoning for Automated Proof-of-Vulnerability Generation
  Haoyu Li, Xijia Che, Yanhao Wang, Xiaojing Liao, Luyi Xing
  arXiv preprint 2025 [Paper]

• BlueSWAT: A Lightweight State-Aware Security Framework for Bluetooth Low Energy
  Xijia Che, Yi He, Xuewei Feng, Kun Sun, Ke Xu, Qi Li
  ACM CCS 2024 [Paper] [Code] [Slide]

• Cross Container Attacks: The Bewildered eBPF on Clouds
  Yi He, Roland Guo, Yunlong Xing, Xijia Che, Kun Sun, Zhoutao Liu, Ke Xu, Qi Li
  Usenix Security 2023 [Paper] [Code] [Slide] [Video]

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Talks

• Confirming Claims of Superposition and Adversarial Examples in Image Classifiers
  Security and Privacy Seminar, UIUC, Aug 2026 [Blog] [Slide]

• BLE State-Aware Defense on IoT and Embedded Devices
  INSC Graduates Forum, Tsinghua University, Oct 2024

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Experience

• AI Safety Research Fellow
  Second Look Research, University of Chicago, 2026

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Services

Reviewer

• Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing
• Transactions on Information Forensics & Security

External Reviewer

• NDSS 2025
• Usenix Security 2024

Artifact Evaluation Committee

• Usenix Security 2026
• ACSAC 2022

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Awards and Honors

• Wing Kai Cheng Fellowship University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2025
• Outstanding Graduate INSC, Tsinghua University, 2025
• National Scholarship Ministry of Education of China, 2024
• Deng Feng Scholarship Tsinghua University, 2024
• Academic Progress Scholarship Tsinghua University, 2020

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Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, 2025 - present

Tsinghua University

• M.S. in Computer Science, 2022 - 2025

Tsinghua University

• B.E. in Electronic Engineering, 2018 - 2022

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Misc

Visiting Student

• Yale University, USA, 2019

Volunteer Middle School Teacher

• “Book Spine”, Xinjiang, 2024
• “We The Painter”, Tibet, 2022
• “Self Discovery”, Shanxi, 2021
• “Gentle Wind”, Xinjiang, 2020
• “Dream School”, Fujian, 2019

I also enjoy photography, badminton and ice hockey.