Qian Lou

Assistant Professor
Computer Science, Cyber Security and Privacy Cluster, University of Central Florida
Email: qian.lou@ucf.edu, Office: HS2 234

My name is Qian Lou, and I am an assistant professor of computer science and a member of the Cybersecurity and Privacy Cluster at the University of Central Florida. I bring a combination of industry and academic experience. After earning my Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington, I worked as a senior research scientist at Samsung Research America. My work sits at the intersection of machine learning and data privacy/security, with a particular emphasis on advancing AI capabilities by unleashing the power of sensitive data. Developing effective approaches requires a confluence of disciplines: AI infrastructure, secure computing, data-driven system design, etc:

• Secure Computing: Applied Cryptography (FHE, MPC), Trusted Hardware (TEE) [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 Machine Learning [CVPR'23, ICLR'23, NeurIPS'23, NAACL'24 , ECCV'24, ACL'24 , EMNLP'24a, EMNLP'24b, NeurIPS'24 ]

[DAC 25] zkVC: Fast Zero-Knowledge Proof for Private and Verifiable Computing
Yancheng Zhang*, Mengxin Zheng, Xun Chen, Jingtong Hu, Weidong Shi, Lei Ju, Yan Solihin, Qian Lou
The Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2025
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[ICLR 25] CipherPrune: Efficient and Scalable Private Transformer Inference
Yancheng Zhang*, Jiaqi Xue*, Mengxin Zheng, Mimi Xie, Mingzhe Zhang, Lei Jiang, Qian Lou
The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[S&P 25] DataSeal: Ensuring the Verifiability of Private Computation on Encrypted Data
Muhammad Husni Santriaji*, Jiaqi Xue*, Yancheng Zhang*, Qian Lou, Yan Solihin
2025 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)
[Paper (PDF)]

[NeurIPS 24] HEPrune: Fast Private Training of Deep Neural Networks With Encrypted Data Pruning
Yancheng Zhang*, Mengxin Zheng, Yuzhang Shang, Xun Chen, Qian Lou
The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[EMNLP 24] BadFair: Backdoored Fairness Attacks with Group-conditioned Triggers
Jiaqi Xue*, Qian Lou, Mengxin Zheng
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP),2024
[Paper (PDF)]

[EMNLP 24] Jailbreaking LLMs with Arabic Transliteration and Arabizi
Mansour Al Ghanim*, Saleh Almohaimeed, Mengxin Zheng, Yan Solihin, Qian Lou
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP),2024
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[MICRO 24] Trinity: A General Purpose FHE Accelerator
Xianglong Deng, Shengyu Fan, Zhicheng Hu, Zhuoyu Tian, Zihao Yang, Jiangrui Yu, Dingyuan Cao, Dan Meng, Rui Hou, Meng Li, Qian Lou, Mingzhe Zhang
IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), 2024
[Paper (PDF)]

[CCS-WAHC 24] HEBridge: Connecting Arithmetic and Logic Operations in FV-style HE Schemes
Yancheng Zhang*, Xun Chen, Qian Lou
WAHC'24: Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Encrypted Computing & Applied Homomorphic Cryptography
[Paper (PDF)]

[CCS-LAMPS 24] TrojFair: Trojan Fairness Attacks
Jiaqi Xue*, Mengxin Zheng, Yi Sheng, Lei Yang, Qian Lou, Lei Jiang
1 st ACM Workshop on Large AI Systems and Models with Privacy and Safety Analysis (LAMPS), 2024
[Paper (PDF)]

[CCS-LAMPS 24] CryptoTrain: Fast Secure Training on Encrypted Data
Jiaqi Xue*, Yancheng Zhang*, Yanshan Wang, Xueqiang Wang, Hao Zheng, Qian Lou
1 st ACM Workshop on Large AI Systems and Models with Privacy and Safety Analysis (LAMPS), 2024
[Paper (PDF)]

[ACL 24] CR-UTP: Certified Robustness against Universal Text Perturbations on Large Language Models
Qian Lou, Xin Liang*, Jiaqi Xue*, Yancheng Zhang*, Rui Xie, Mengxin Zheng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2024
[Paper (PDF)][Code]

[ISLPED 24] OFHE: An Electro-Optical Accelerator for Discretized TFHE
Mengxin Zheng, Cheng Chu, Qian Lou, Nathan Youngblood, Mo Li, Sajjad Moazeni, Lei Jiang
Proceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED), 2024
[Paper (PDF)]

[PACT 24] BoostCom: Towards Efficient Universal Fully Homomorphic Encryption by Boosting the Word-wise Comparisons
Ardhi Wiratama Baskara Yudha*, Jiaqi Xue*, Qian Lou, Huiyang Zhou, Yan Solihin
The International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), 2024
[Paper (PDF)]

[ECCV 24] WBP: Training-time Backdoor Attacks through Weight Bit Poisoning.
Kunbei Cai, Zhenkai Zhang, Qian Lou, Fan Yao
The 18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[ECCV 24] SSL-Cleanse: Trojan detection and mitigation in self-supervised learning.
Mengxin Zheng, Jiaqi Xue, Zihao Wang, Xun Chen, Qian Lou, Lei Jiang, Xiaofeng Wang
The 18th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 2024
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[Mathematics 24] Unveiling Fall Triggers in Older Adults: A Machine Learning Graphical Model Analysis
Tho Nguyen, Ladda Thiamwong, Qian Lou, Rui Xie
Mathematics, 2024
[Paper (PDF)]

[NAACL 24] TrojFSP: Trojan Insertion in Few-shot Prompt Tuning
Mengxin Zheng, Jiaqi Xue*, Xun Chen, Yanshan Wang, Qian Lou, Lei Jiang
Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (NAACL), 2024
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[NeurIPS 23] Trojllm: A black-box trojan prompt attack on large language models
Jiaqi Xue*, Mengxin Zheng, Ting Hua, Yilin Shen, Yepeng Liu*, Ladislau Bölöni, Qian Lou
37th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), 2023
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[CVPR 23] TrojViT: Trojan Insertion in Vision Transformers
Mengxin Zheng, Qian Lou, Lei Jiang
The IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2023
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[ECAI 23] TrojBits: A Hardware Aware Inference-Time Attack on Transformer-Based Language Models
Mansour Al Ghanim*, Muhammad Santriaji, Qian Lou, Yan Solihin
26th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI), 2023
[Paper (PDF)]

[ISQED 23] PriML: An Electro-Optical Accelerator for Private Machine Learning on Encrypted Data
Mengxin Zheng, Fan Chen, Lei Jiang, Qian Lou
24th International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), 2023
[Paper (PDF)]

[ADMA 23] Cryptography-Inspired Federated Learning for Generative Adversarial Networks and Meta Learning
Yu Zheng, Wei Song, Minxin Du, Sherman S. M. Chow, Qian Lou, Yongjun Zhao, Xiuhua Wang
International Conference on Advanced Data Mining and Applications (ADMA), 2023
[Paper (PDF)]

[ICLR 23] TrojText: Invisible Test-time Trojan Insertion
Qian Lou, Yepeng Liu*, Bo Feng
The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations(ICLR), 2023
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[DAC 23] Primer: Privacy-Preserving Transformer on Encrypted Data
Mengxin Zheng, Qian Lou, Lei Jiang
60th ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2023
[Paper (PDF)]

[NANOARCH 22] CryptoLight: An Electro-Optical Accelerator for Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Mengxin Zheng, Qian Lou, Fan Chen, Lei Jiang, Yongxin Zhu
Proceedings of the 17th ACM International Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures(NANOARCH), 2022
[Paper (PDF)]

[CVPR 22] Lite-MDETR: A Lightweight Multi-Modal Detector
Qian Lou, Yen-Chang Hsu, Burak Uzkent, Ting Hua, Yilin Shen, and Hongxia Jin
The IEEE / CVF Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference (CVPR), 2022
[Paper (PDF)][Samsung website]

[ICLR 22] DictFormer: Tiny Transformer with Shared Dictionary
Qian Lou, Ting Hua, Yen-Chang Hsu, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin
The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR),2022
[Paper (PDF)] [Samsung website]

[ICLR 22] Language model compression with weighted low-rank factorization
Yen-Chang Hsu, Ting Hua, Sung-En Chang, Qian Lou, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin
The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR),2022
[Paper (PDF)] [Samsung website]

[EMNLP 22] Numerical Optimizations for Weighted Low-rank Estimation on Language Model
Ting Hua, Yen-Chang Hsu, Felicity Wang, Qian Lou, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2022
[Paper (PDF)]

[ICLR 21] SAFENet: A Secure, Accurate and Fast Neural Network Inference
Qian Lou, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin, Lei Jiang The International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR),2021
[Paper (PDF)][Samsung website]

[IJCAI 21] Automatic Mixed-Precision Quantization Search of BERT
Changsheng Zhao, Ting Hua, Yilin Shen, Qian Lou, Hongxia Jin International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI),2021
[Paper (PDF)][Samsung website]

[DAC 22] MATCHA: A Fast and Energy-Efficient Accelerator for Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus
Lei Jiang, Qian Lou, Nrushad Joshi
The Design Automation Conference (DAC), 2022
[Paper (PDF)]

[DATE, 22] coxHE: A software-hardware co-design framework for FPGA acceleration of homomorphic computation
Mingqin Han, Yilan Zhu, Qian Lou, Zimeng Zhou, Shanqing Guo, Lei Ju
Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), 2022
[Paper (PDF)]

[ICML 21] HEMET: A Homomorphic-Encryption-Friendly Privacy-Preserving Mobile Neural Network Architecture
Qian Lou, Lei Jiang
International conference on machine learning (ICML), 2021
[Paper (PDF)][Code]

[EMNLP 21] CryptoGRU: Low Latency Privacy-Preserving Text Analysis With GRU
Bo Feng, Qian Lou, Geoffrey C. Fox, Lei Jiang
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2021
[Paper (PDF)]

[NeurIPS 20] AutoPrivacy: Automated Layer-wise Parameter Selection for Secure Neural Network Inference
Qian Lou, Bian Song, Lei Jiang
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems(NeurIPS), 2020
[Paper (PDF)]

[NeurIPS 20] Falcon: Fast Spectral Inference on Encrypted Data
Qian Lou, Wenjie Lu, Cheng Hong, Lei Jiang
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems(NeurIPS), 2020
[Paper (PDF)]

[NeurIPS 20] Glyph: Fast and accurately training deep neural networks on encrypted data
Qian Lou, Bo Feng, Geoffrey C. Fox, Lei Jiang
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems(NeurIPS), 2020
[Paper (PDF)]

[PACT 20] Helix: Algorithm/Architecture Co-design for Accelerating Nanopore Genome Base-calling
Qian Lou, Sarath Janga, Lei Jiang
International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT), 2020
[Paper (PDF)][Best paper candidate]

[ICLR 20] AutoQ: Automated Kernel-Wise Neural Network Quantization
Qian Lou, Feng Guo, Minje Kim, Lantao Liu, Lei Jiang
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2020
[Paper (PDF)]

[DATE 20] LightBulb: A Photonic-Nonvolatile-Memory-based Accelerator for Binarized Convolutional Neural Networks
Farzaneh Zokaee, Qian Lou, Nathan Youngblood, Weichen Liu, Yiyuan Xie, Lei Jiang
Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), 2020
[Paper (PDF)]

[ASP-DAC, 20] MindReading: An Ultra-Low-Power Photonic Accelerator for EEG-based Human Intention Recognition
Qian Lou, Wenyang Liu, Weichen Liu, Feng Guo, Lei Jiang
25th Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC), 2020
[Paper (PDF)]

[DATE 19] Holylight: A nanophotonic accelerator for deep learning in data centers
Weichen Liu, Wenyang Liu, Yichen Ye, Qian Lou, Yiyuan Xie, Lei Jiang
Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), 2019
[Paper (PDF)]

[NeurIPS, 19] SHE: A Fast and Accurate Deep Neural Network for Encrypted Data
Qian Lou, Lei Jiang
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems(NeurIPS), 2019
[Paper (PDF)] [ Code ]

[ICCAD 18] 3dict: a reliable and qos capable mobile process-in-memory architecture for lookup-based cnns in 3d xpoint rerams
Qian Lou, Wujie Wen, Lei Jiang
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), 2018
[Paper (PDF)]

[CAL 18] BRAWL: A Spintronics-Based Portable Basecalling-in-Memory Architecture for Nanopore Genome Sequencing
Qian Lou, Lei Jiang
IEEE Computer Architecture Letters,2018
[Paper (PDF)]

[NVMSA 17] Runtime and reconfiguration dual-aware placement for SRAM-NVM hybrid FPGAs
Qian Lou, Mengying Zhao, Lei Ju, Chun Jason Xue, Jingtong Hu, Zhiping Jia
IEEE 6th Non-Volatile Memory Systems and Applications Symposium (NVMSA),2017
[Paper (PDF)] [Code]

[US20240080423A1] Fusion techniques for combining most significant bits and least significant bits of image data in image processing or other applications
Wenbo Li, Zhipeng Mo, Yi Wei, Burak Uzkent, Qian Lou, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin
[Patent (PDF)]

[US20230177338A1] Small and fast transformer model for multi-modal or other tasks
Qian Lou, Yen-Chang Hsu, Burak Uzkent, Ting Hua, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin
[Patent (PDF)]

[US20230104491A1] Small and fast transformer with shared dictionary
Qian Lou, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin, Ting Hua, Yen-Chang Hsu
[Patent (PDF)]

[US20230106213A1] Machine learning model compression using weighted low-rank factorization
Yen-chang Hsu, Ting Hua, Feixuan Wang, Qian Lou, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin
[Patent (PDF)]

[US20220121947A1] Method and system for secure, accurate and fast neural network inference
Qian Lou, Yilin Shen, Hongxia Jin
[Patent (PDF)]