Curriculum Vitae
Haowen Xu · hxu4@wpi.edu · Worcester, MA, USA · Google Scholar · ORCID
Research Interests
Trustworthy artificial intelligence; LLM agent safety; multi-agent systems; machine learning robustness; cyber-physical systems security; side-channel attacks; wearable and IoT privacy.
Education
2024 – Dec 2026 (expected)
M.S. in Computer Science
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
2020 – 2024
B.Eng. in Communication Engineering
Nanjing University
Experience
Jun 2026 – Present
AI Security Research
ByteDance Security
Investigating behavior-level security for LLM agents, with a focus on how tool-use patterns, execution context, and policy constraints can jointly characterize malicious or unintended behavior. Designing and empirically evaluating lightweight detection and prefiltering methods to improve threat coverage, robustness, and false-positive control in production-scale agent systems.
Selected Publications
- Haowen Xu, Xue Tan, Lei Ma, Zhihao Zhang, Chao Wang, Qingze Wang, Ping Chen, Jun Dai, and Xiaoyan Sun. “When Agents Go Rogue: Activation-Based Detection of Malicious Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems.” ICML, 2026.
- Haowen Xu, Tianya Zhao, Xuyu Wang, et al. “EMPalm: Exfiltrating Palm Biometric Data via Electromagnetic Side-Channels.” ACM SenSys, 2026.
- Junye Jiang, Jingcheng Ju, Haowen Xu, Zhenlu Tan, Duohe Ma, Jun Dai, and Xiaoyan Sun. “VibLeak: Towards Practical Covert Data Leakage via Phone Vibrations.” IEEE MILCOM, 2025. [PDF]
- Haowen Xu, Tianya Zhao, et al. “MagWatch: Exposing Privacy Risks in Smartwatches through Electromagnetic Signals.” ICICS, 2025. [PDF]
Teaching
- Teaching Assistant, Responsible Artificial Intelligence, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Fall 2024.
Academic Service
- Reviewer: IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (2026); SVCC (2026); IEEE IPCCC (2024–2025); SECRYPT (2025); ACM CCS Poster Track (2024).