Qian Lou
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Director of Unbounded AI Lab at UCF and Assistant Professor |
Publications | Research Group | Teaching | Google Scholar | Patents
Qian Lou is the director of the Unbounded AI Lab at the University of Central Florida, where he is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Cluster. He brings both industry and academic experience, having earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington and served as a senior research scientist at Samsung Research America. At UCF, he leads the Unbounded AI Lab with the mission of overcoming the bounds imposed by privacy, trust, and performance constraints on AI infrastructure and systems, enabling Confidential, Verifiable, and Efficient AI Computing at Scale. Developing effective approaches requires a confluence of disciplines: AI infrastructure, Secure computing, Efficient Intelligent Systems, etc:
- Secure AI Computing via Applied Cryptography and Trusted Hardware [NeurIPS'19, NeurIPS'20a, NeurIPS'20b, NeurIPS'20c, ICML'21, ICLR'21, US Patent, EMNLP'21, DAC'22, DAC'23, CCS'24 WAHC, CCS'24 LAMPS, S&P'25 (Oakland), NeurIPS'24 ]
- AI Infrastructure: Data, Models, Algorithms, and Hardware [ICCAD'18, DATE'19, ICLR'20, ASP-DAC'20, DATE'20, PACT'20 (Best Paper Nomination), IJCAI'21, ICLR'22a, CVPR'22, EMNLP'22, DATE'22, DAC'22, NANOARCH'22, ISQED'23 Invitation, PACT'24, MICRO'24 , US Patent, US Patent, US Patent ]
- Secure and Safe Large Language Models [CVPR'23, ICLR'23, NeurIPS'23, NAACL'24 , ECCV'24, ACL'24 , EMNLP'24a, EMNLP'24b, NeurIPS'24 ]
News
| 08 / 2025 | Our privacy-preserving data synthesis based on private computing is funded by NSF SaTC Crosscutting. |
| 08 / 2025 | Two papers are accepted by EMNLP 2026. Congratulations to Rochana and Mansour! |
| 04 / 2025 | Our LLM Application Security Testing (LAST) Framework is funded by DoD Pathfinder Program. |
| 03 / 2025 | Our system support for secure computing is funded by NSF CISE Core. |
| 02 / 2025 | One paper is accepted by DAC 2025. |
| 01 / 2025 | One paper is accepted by ICLR 2025. |
| 10 / 2024 | One paper is accepted by NeurIPS 2024. |
| 09 / 2024 | Two papers about Jailbreaking and Fairness Backdoor are accepted by EMNLP 2024. |
| 09 / 2024 | DataSeal is accepted by IEEE S&P 2025. |
| 07 / 2024 | One paper is accepted by MICRO 2024. |
| 07 / 2024 | WBP is accepted by ECCV 2024. |
| 07 / 2024 | SSL-Cleanse is accepted by ECCV 2024. |
| 06 / 2024 | BoostCom is accepted by PACT 2024. |
| 05 / 2024 | Congratulations to Jiaqi Xue and Yancheng Zhang, who started their internships at Samsung Research America. |
| 05 / 2024 | CR-UTP is accepted by ACL 2024. |
| 03 / 2024 | TrojFSP is accepted by NAACL 2024 (Oral in the main conference). |
| 09 / 2023 | TrojLLM is accepted by NeurIPS 2023. |
| 02 / 2023 | TrojViT is accepted by CVPR 2023. |
| 02 / 2023 | Primer is accepted by DAC 2023. |
| 01 / 2023 | TrojText is accepted by ICLR 2023. |
| 10 / 2022 | Weighted value decomposition on language model is accepted by EMNLP 2022. |
| 03 / 2022 | LITE-MDETR is accepted by CVPR 2022. |
| 02 / 2022 | MATCHA is accepted by DAC 2022. |
| 01 / 2022 | Language Model Compression is accepted by ICLR 2022. |
| 01 / 2022 | DictFormer is accepted by ICLR 2022. |
| 08 / 2021 | CryptoGRU is accepted by EMNLP 2021. |
| 05 / 2021 | HEMET is accepted by ICML 2021. |
| 05 / 2021 | Qian received a Luddy Outstanding Research Award. |
| 09 / 2020 | Three papers were accepted by NeurIPS 2020. |
Research Group
Our research is driven by a talented, collaborative team.
Ph.D. Students
- Mansour Al Ghanim (2021 Fall -)
- Jiaqi Xue (2023 Spring-)
- Rochana Prih Hastuti (2023 Fall-)
- Mayank Kumar (2024 Fall-)
- Hedong Zhang (2024 Fall-)
- Yifei Zhao (2024 Fall-)
Prospective Students: We are recruiting two Ph.D. students and one postdoctoral researcher to join the Unbounded AI Lab at UCF. Interested applicants should email qian.lou@ucf.edu with the subject line:“2026 Prospective Member – Unbounded AI Lab at UCF”. Please include your CV and a summary of your research experience, interests, and notable accomplishments. We especially welcome applications from candidates in the United States and local regions. International applicants should also provide English proficiency scores (TOEFL/IELTS) and GRE results if required by UCF’s admission policies. For application details, please apply through the CS department and include my name as a possible advisor in your application.
Have questions? Check out my answers to the PhD Advisor Guide.
Recent Community Services
NSF: Panelist
ICLR 2026: Area Chair
NeurIPS 2025: Area Chair
CCS 2026: Program Committee
NDSS 2026: Program Committee
GLSVLSI 2025: Track Chair
ISCA: Program Committee
DAC: Technical Program Committee
ISCA 2023: Local Area Chair
Tiny and Fair ML Design Contest Organizer at ESWEEK 2023
IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security: Reviewer
AI for Content Creation (AI4CC) Workshop @ CVPR 2024: Area Chair
AAAI: Senior Program Committee
NeurIPS: Reviewer
ICML: Reviewer
ACL/NAACL: Reviewer
ICLR: Reviewer
CVPR: Reviewer
ECCV: Reviewer
Teaching
2022 Fall: CDA 5106 Advanced Computer Architecture
2023 Spring: CAP 6614 Current Topics in Machine Learning
2023 Fall: CDA 5106 Advanced Computer Architecture
2024 Spring: CAP 6614 Current Topics in Machine Learning
2025 Spring: CAP 6614 Current Topics in Machine Learning
Publications
Publications at UCF
* indicates students and staff under my supervision[DAC 25] zkVC: Fast Zero-Knowledge Proof for Private and Verifiable Computing |
[ICLR 25] CipherPrune: Efficient and Scalable Private Transformer Inference |
[S&P 25] DataSeal: Ensuring the Verifiability of Private Computation on Encrypted Data |
[NeurIPS 24] HEPrune: Fast Private Training of Deep Neural Networks With Encrypted Data Pruning |
[EMNLP 24] BadFair: Backdoored Fairness Attacks with Group-conditioned Triggers |
[EMNLP 24] Jailbreaking LLMs with Arabic Transliteration and Arabizi |
[MICRO 24] Trinity: A General Purpose FHE Accelerator |
[CCS-WAHC 24] HEBridge: Connecting Arithmetic and Logic Operations in FV-style HE Schemes |
[CCS-LAMPS 24] TrojFair: Trojan Fairness Attacks |
[CCS-LAMPS 24] CryptoTrain: Fast Secure Training on Encrypted Data |
[ACL 24] CR-UTP: Certified Robustness against Universal Text Perturbations on Large Language Models |
[ISLPED 24] OFHE: An Electro-Optical Accelerator for Discretized TFHE |
[PACT 24] BoostCom: Towards Efficient Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption by Boosting the Word-wise Comparisons |
[ECCV 24] WBP: Training-time Backdoor Attacks through Weight Bit Poisoning. |
[ECCV 24] SSL-Cleanse: Trojan detection and mitigation in self-supervised learning. |
[Mathematics 24] Unveiling Fall Triggers in Older Adults: A Machine Learning Graphical Model Analysis |
[NAACL 24] TrojFSP: Trojan Insertion in Few-shot Prompt Tuning |
[NeurIPS 23] Trojllm: A black-box trojan prompt attack on large language models |
[CVPR 23] TrojViT: Trojan Insertion in Vision Transformers |
[ECAI 23] TrojBits: A Hardware Aware Inference-Time Attack on Transformer-Based Language Models |
[ISQED 23] PriML: An Electro-Optical Accelerator for Private Machine Learning on Encrypted Data |
[ADMA 23] Cryptography-Inspired Federated Learning for Generative Adversarial Networks and Meta Learning |
[ICLR 23] TrojText: Invisible Test-time Trojan Insertion |
[DAC 23] Primer: Privacy-Preserving Transformer on Encrypted Data |
[NANOARCH 22] CryptoLight: An Electro-Optical Accelerator for Fully Homomorphic Encryption |
Publications at Samsung Research America
[CVPR 22] Lite-MDETR: A Lightweight Multi-Modal Detector |
[ICLR 22] DictFormer: Tiny Transformer with Shared Dictionary |
[ICLR 22] Language model compression with weighted low-rank factorization |
[EMNLP 22] Numerical Optimizations for Weighted Low-rank Estimation on Language Model |
[ICLR 21] SAFENet: A Secure, Accurate and Fast Neural Network Inference |
[IJCAI 21] Automatic Mixed-Precision Quantization Search of BERT |
Publications at Indiana University Bloomington
[DAC 22] MATCHA: A Fast and Energy-Efficient Accelerator for Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus |
[DATE, 22] coxHE: A software-hardware co-design framework for FPGA acceleration of homomorphic computation |
[ICML 21] HEMET: A Homomorphic-Encryption-Friendly Privacy-Preserving Mobile Neural Network Architecture |
[EMNLP 21] CryptoGRU: Low Latency Privacy-Preserving Text Analysis With GRU |
[NeurIPS 20] AutoPrivacy: Automated Layer-wise Parameter Selection for Secure Neural Network Inference |
[NeurIPS 20] Falcon: Fast Spectral Inference on Encrypted Data |
[NeurIPS 20] Glyph: Fast and accurately training deep neural networks on encrypted data |
[PACT 20] Helix: Algorithm/Architecture Co-design for Accelerating Nanopore Genome Base-calling |
[ICLR 20] AutoQ: Automated Kernel-Wise Neural Network Quantization |
[DATE 20] LightBulb: A Photonic-Nonvolatile-Memory-based Accelerator for Binarized Convolutional Neural Networks |
[ASP-DAC, 20] MindReading: An Ultra-Low-Power Photonic Accelerator for EEG-based Human Intention Recognition |
[DATE 19] Holylight: A nanophotonic accelerator for deep learning in data centers |
[NeurIPS, 19] SHE: A Fast and Accurate Deep Neural Network for Encrypted Data |
[ICCAD 18] 3dict: a reliable and qos capable mobile process-in-memory architecture for lookup-based cnns in 3d xpoint rerams |
[CAL 18] BRAWL: A Spintronics-Based Portable Basecalling-in-Memory Architecture for Nanopore Genome Sequencing |
Publications at Shandong University
[NVMSA 17] Runtime and reconfiguration dual-aware placement for SRAM-NVM hybrid FPGAs |
Patents
[US20240080423A1] Fusion techniques for combining most significant bits and least significant bits of image data in image processing or other applications |
[US20230177338A1] Small and fast transformer model for multi-modal or other tasks |
[US20230104491A1] Small and fast transformer with shared dictionary |
[US20230106213A1] Machine learning model compression using weighted low-rank factorization |
[US20220121947A1] Method and system for secure, accurate and fast neural network inference |