Yini Huang

Hello! This is Yini Huang~

About

My name is Yini Huang(黄依妮). I am an MPhil student in Data Science and Analytics at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), advised by Prof. Jiaheng Wei. Before that, I received my Bachelor degree from Donghua University in 2025.

I am expected to graduate from HKUST(GZ) in May 2027 and actively looking for PhD openings for Fall 2027.

My current interests include trustworthy AI and multimodal agent system. Recently, I have also been exploring Embodied-AI. Welcome to reach out for potential discussions and research collaborations.

Trustworthy AI Multimodal Agent System Embodied-AI

Experience

Education

2025 - 2027

MPhil in Data Science and Analytics

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China

2021 - 2025

BSc in Statistics

Donghua University, Shanghai, China

2021 - 2025

BFA in Fashion and Accessory Design

Donghua University, Shanghai, China

Work

2025

AI Data Operation Intern

AI Data Service and Operation Department

ByteDance, Shanghai, China

2024 - 2025

Data Analysis Intern

Data and Technology Department

Publicis Groupe, Shanghai, China

Publications

What Your Posts Reveal paper figure
Paper figure · assets/publications/posts-reveal.jpg

2026

What Your Posts Reveal: A Benchmark and Agentic Framework for User-Level Privacy Leakage on Social Media

Zifan Peng*, Yini Huang*, Aiwen Lu*, Qiming Ye, Peixian Zhang, Jingyi Zheng, Yule Liu, Xuechao Wang, Xinlei He, Jiaheng Wei ( * Equal contribution. Corresponding author.)

Submitted to EMNLP 2026 arXiv

Public social media posts can reveal private information through weak cues scattered across text, images, or metadata. Such leakage is often cumulative and cross-post: cues that appear harmless in isolation may jointly expose a user's home, workplace, or routine. However, current research lacks a unified benchmark for user-level multimodal privacy leakage and an evaluation metric that captures exposure severity beyond binary accuracy.

To address these gaps, we propose SopriBench, a synthetic benchmark guided by leakage patterns abstracted from a private reference corpus of Rednote and Instagram accounts, covering 50 user profiles and 1,569 images with attributes, contextual sensitivity, granularity, leakage type, inference difficulty, and supporting evidence. We further introduce the Privacy Exposure Score (PES), which weights value granularity by contextual sensitivity. Inspired by abductive reasoning, we introduce Argus, a training-free agentic framework for cumulative leakage inference. Argus forms hypotheses from accumulated evidence, verifies supporting evidence, and aggregates cross-post cues into privacy profiles, achieving 0.55 PES, a 25% improvement over the strongest baseline, with the largest gain on cross-post leakage.

UniCA paper figure
Paper figure · assets/publications/unica.jpg

2026

UniCA: Bi-directional Cross-Attention with Positive Similarity Loss for Robust Multi-Modal Retrieval

Yini Huang, Wenlong Zhang

Accepted by ICAICA 2026 Coming soon

Multi-modal retrieval has become increasingly critical for handling the growing volume of integrated visual-textual data in real-world applications, but existing frameworks rely on implicit fusion via text encoder self-attention, limiting explicit cross-modal semantic alignment.

To address this gap, this paper proposes UniCA (Unified Cross-Attention Encoder), a multi-modal retrieval model with four key innovations: 1) a bi-directional cross-attention (Bi-CA) block that enables active semantic exchange between visual and textual tokens prior to concatenation, capturing inter-modal correlations more efficiently. 2) a Positive Similarity Loss that optimizes absolute semantic proximity between query and positive candidate embeddings. 3) a streamlined dataset UMR-S10 (Universal Multimodal Retrieval Sample 10%) to reduce computational costs while retaining semantic diversity and task representativeness. 4) an experimental validation on the WebQA benchmark demonstrates that UniCA outperforms the baseline model across Hybrid and Image-Text tasks, achieving improvements of up to 4.09% in Recall@5, 3.28% in Recall@10, and 3.96% in MRR@1 for the hybrid task. UniCA provides an efficient and robust solution for multi-modal retrieval, lowering deployment barriers through its lightweight dataset and enhanced fusion mechanism.

Projects

Ongoing

Emotional Multimodal Agent for Indoor Floating Robots

Background: This research focuses on building an emotional multimodal agent for indoor companion robot, providing domestic companion for people who live alone and need emotion support.

Work

  1. Completed the overall architecture design of the multimodal emotion recognition module, which supports audio and video dual-stream input to comprehensively capture environmental information, facial expressions and body movements for integrated user emotion evaluation.
  2. Proposed a cloud-edge collaborative deployment scheme to address the VRAM hardware limitation of devices. It deploys models on remote servers and encapsulates inference logic into lightweight APIs, supporting stable remote invocation and structured analytical output on local terminals.

Next Plan: Develop the long-term memory module which aims to allow the multimodal agent to gradually learn and remember the user's lifestyle preferences and chat habits.

Ongoing

Adversarial Training for Web Agent Attack Detection and Localization

Background: Target security vulnerabilities of VLM-based Web agents such as malicious fake buttons and plug-in attacks, addressing the drawback of traditional methods only providing coarse safety judgment without attack localization and repair.

Work

  1. Developed a dynamic adversarial training pipeline, leveraging an Attacker to synthesize hard attack examples and applying reinforcement learning algorithms to optimize the Defender model for continuous evolution.
  2. Engineered the Defender model to perform diagnostics on the agent's execution trajectory, achieving precise localization of compromised segments rather than relying on simple binary safety classification.

Next Plan: Enrich adversarial dataset and iteratively optimize the defense model's adaptability to diverse real-world web malicious attacks.

Sep 2025 – Dec 2025

A Multimodal Avatar-LLM-driven Framework for IELTS Speaking Assessment and Practice

Background: Existing IELTS oral training lacks immersive human-like interaction and standardized automated scoring, hence building avatar-based intelligent practice system aligned with official examination standards.

Work

  1. Co-developed a multimodal AI digital human-based IELTS Speaking Simulator for Part 1-3 practice, integrating LLM, ASR/TTS, and virtual avatar technology to realize realistic voice interaction and intelligent question generation.
  2. Constructed an automatic assessment system based on official IELTS criteria, completing multi-dimensional scoring and detailed feedback report generation for oral responses.