Hi there. I’m Jiarui Y. Li, a PhD student in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, supervised by Prof. Morley Mao. I also work closely with Prof. Qingzhao Zhang. My research focuses on the security and robustness of AI-driven systems, with an emphasis on cyber-physical settings. In particular, I study how vulnerabilities in learning-based components can manifest in real-world autonomous systems, and develop principled approaches to analyze and mitigate such risks.

I hold an MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence Engineering - Information Security from the Information Networking Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where I specialized in secure distributed machine learning. I worked closely with Prof. Carlee Joe-Wong and Prof. Gauri Joshi.

Prior to this, I obtained my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen in 2022, advised by Prof. Yeh-Ching Chung. I also interned at Tencent AI Lab for one year, mentored by Dr. Wenxiang Jiao.

🏀 I love sports, especially basketball :)

Featured Project

Banshee: Acoustic Target Switch Attacks on UAV Visual Tracking — IEEE S&P 2026

The first physically realizable acoustic attack that hijacks UAV visual tracking by exploiting gimbal-camera vulnerabilities, achieving 95.5% success in real-world black-box attacks on a commercial drone. See the project website for paper, video, slides, and code.