Yang Ouyang

youyang7 AT ncsu DOT edu

Raleigh, NC 27529

He is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at North Carolina State University, advised by Professor Jung-Eun Kim.

Before joining NC State University, he received his Master of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the School of Pratt at Duke University, where he collaborated with the CEI Lab . He also holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science and Technology from Shenzhen University, where he worked with Prof. Jianqiang Li of the College of CSSE.

My Main Research Interests:

Trustworthy & Efficient ML
Interpretable LLMs

News

Jan, 2025	One first-authored paper is accepted by NAACL 2025! One Co-authored paper is accepted by ICLR 2025!

Selected Publications

Submitted to ICML

DenseSteer: Steering Small Language Models towards Dense Math Reasoning

Yang Ouyang, Shuhang Lin, and Jung-Eun Kim

The 43rd International Conference on Machine Learnings, 2026

Bib

@article{haha,
  title = {DenseSteer: Steering Small Language Models towards Dense Math Reasoning},
  author = {Ouyang, Yang and Lin, Shuhang and Kim, Jung-Eun},
  journal = {The 43rd International Conference on Machine Learnings},
  year = {2026},
}

NAACL
Layer-Level Self-Exposure and Patch: Affirmative Token Mitigation for Jailbreak Attack Defense

Yang Ouyang, Hengrui Gu, Shuhang Lin, and 6 more authors

In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), Apr 2025

Abs DOI Bib PDF Website

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in diverse applications, including chatbot assistants and code generation, aligning their behavior with safety and ethical standards has become paramount. However, jailbreak attacks, which exploit vulnerabilities to elicit unintended or harmful outputs, threaten LLMs safety significantly. In this paper, we introduce Layer-AdvPatcher, a novel methodology designed to defend against jailbreak attacks by utilizing an unlearning strategy to patch specific layers within LLMs through self-augmented datasets. Our insight is that certain layer(s), tend to produce affirmative tokens when faced with harmful prompts. By identifying these layers and adversarially exposing them to generate more harmful data, one can understand their inherent and diverse vulnerabilities to attacks. With these exposures, we then “unlearn” these issues, reducing the impact of affirmative tokens and hence minimizing jailbreak risks while keeping the model’s responses to safe queries intact.We conduct extensive experiments on two models, four benchmark datasets, and multiple state-of-the-art jailbreak attacks to demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. Results indicate that our framework reduces the harmfulness and attack success rate of jailbreak attacks without compromising utility for benign queries compared to recent defense methods. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/oyy2000/LayerAdvPatcher
@inproceedings{ouyang-etal-2025-layer, title = {Layer-Level Self-Exposure and Patch: Affirmative Token Mitigation for Jailbreak Attack Defense}, author = {Ouyang, Yang and Gu, Hengrui and Lin, Shuhang and Hua, Wenyue and Peng, Jie and Kailkhura, Bhavya and Gao, Meijun and Chen, Tianlong and Zhou, Kaixiong}, editor = {Chiruzzo, Luis and Ritter, Alan and Wang, Lu}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)}, month = apr, year = {2025}, address = {Albuquerque, New Mexico}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.623/}, doi = {10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.623}, pages = {12541--12554}, isbn = {979-8-89176-189-6}, }

ICLR

Min-k%++: Improved baseline for detecting pre-training data from large language models

Jingyang Zhang^*, Jingwei Sun^*, Eric Yeats, and 5 more authors

The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations, 2025

Awarded Bib PDF Website

Spotlight

@article{zhang2024min,
  title = {Min-k\%++: Improved baseline for detecting pre-training data from large language models},
  author = {Zhang, Jingyang and Sun, Jingwei and Yeats, Eric and Ouyang, Yang and Kuo, Martin and Zhang, Jianyi and Yang, Hao Frank and Li, Hai},
  journal = {The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year = {2025},
}