Yuzhou Nie (聂宇舟)
UC Santa Barbara. Santa Barbara. yuzhounie@ucsb.edu.
Building 556, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106
I am a second-year PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the Department of Computer Science. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Wenbo Guo, and I work closely with Prof. Bo Li and Prof. Dawn Song. I received my bachelor’s degree in Statistics from Renmin University of China, where I was advised by Prof. Hongteng Xu.
I am also a founding member of Virtue AI, working on agent security as a research scientist.
Research
- Agentic System
- Projects: OWL, SecCodePLT
- (Co-)first-author publications: THETA (ICML 26), SecCodePLT (NeurIPS 25), TermiGen (Preprint 26)
- Other publications: OpenSage (ICML 26), OWL (NeurIPS 25)
- AI Security
- Projects: VulnLLM-R, LeakAgent
- (Co-)first-author publications: BlueCodeAgent (ICML 26), LeakAgent (COLM 25), RLbreaker (NeurIPS 24), VulnLLM-R (Preprint 26), TrojFM (Preprint 24)
- Other publications: AgentVigil (EMNLP 25), RL-JACK (Preprint 24)
- Others
- (Co-)first-author publications: GWMAC (CIKM 22)
News
| Apr 30, 2026 | Three papers accepted to ICML 2026: OpenSage, BlueCodeAgent, and THETA! |
|---|---|
| Feb 15, 2026 | VulnLLM-R-7B reached #2 most-downloaded model on HuggingFace this month! Repo: ucsb-mlsec/VulnLLM-R. |
| Oct 28, 2025 | Two papers accepted to NeurIPS 2025: SeCodePLT and OWL. See you in San Diego! |
| Aug 21, 2025 | One paper (AgentVigil) accepted to EMNLP 2025! |
| Jul 12, 2025 | One paper accepted to COLM 2025, see you in Montréal! |
| Jun 9, 2025 | We will be giving a tutorial on multimodal generation evaluation at CVPR 2025 in Nashville! |
| May 21, 2025 | I will continue to work as a research intern at Virtue AI from June 2025 to August 2025, advised by Bo Li. |
| Apr 23, 2025 | We release the new agent framework OWL, achieving GAIA benchmark score of 69.09%, ranking #1 among open-source frameworks. Check the technical report here. |
| Apr 1, 2025 | I will be a research intern at virtue.ai from 2025-04-01 to 2025-06-13 working on code guardrails for LLMs. |
| Feb 13, 2025 | Our team (ForesAIght) won the 1st place in safety track of Berkeley LLM Agents Hackathon! Check out our report, code for more details. |
| Sep 23, 2024 | I get UCSB research Excellent Award! |
| Jul 21, 2024 | I get FAR AI Research Grant to support my research from 2024-2025! |
| Mar 21, 2024 | I will join UCSB as a PhD student in Computer Science. |
| Jan 16, 2023 | I will join Microsoft Research Asia as a Research Intern. |