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Zhihang Deng

Publications and source records attributed to Zhihang Deng.

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From Secure Agentic AI to Secure Agentic Web: Challenges, Threats, and Future Directions

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agentic systems that plan, memorize, and act in open-world environments. This shift brings new security problems: failures are no longer only unsafe text generation, but can become real harm through tool use, persistent memory, and interaction with untrusted web content. In this survey, we provide a transition-oriented view from Secure Agentic AI to a Secure Agentic Web. We first summarize a component-aligned threat taxonomy covering prompt abuse, environment injection, memory attacks, toolchain abuse, model tampering, and agent network attacks. We then review defense strategies, including prompt hardening, safety-aware decoding, privilege control for tools and APIs, runtime monitoring, continuous red-teaming, and protocol-level security mechanisms. We further discuss how these threats and mitigations escalate in the Agentic Web, where delegation chains, cross-domain interactions, and protocol-mediated ecosystems amplify risks via propagation and composition. Finally, we highlight open challenges for web-scale deployment, such as interoperable identity and authorization, provenance and traceability, ecosystem-level response, and scalable evaluation under adaptive adversaries. Our goal is to connect recent empirical findings with system-level requirements, and to outline practical research directions toward trustworthy agent ecosystems.

cs.CR

FedQS: Optimizing Gradient and Model Aggregation for Semi-Asynchronous Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training across multiple parties without sharing raw data, with semi-asynchronous FL (SAFL) emerging as a balanced approach between synchronous and asynchronous FL. However, SAFL faces significant challenges in optimizing both gradient-based (e.g., FedSGD) and model-based (e.g., FedAvg) aggregation strategies, which exhibit distinct trade-offs in accuracy, convergence speed, and stability. While gradient aggregation achieves faster convergence and higher accuracy, it suffers from pronounced fluctuations, whereas model aggregation offers greater stability but slower convergence and suboptimal accuracy. This paper presents FedQS, the first framework to theoretically analyze and address these disparities in SAFL. FedQS introduces a divide-and-conquer strategy to handle client heterogeneity by classifying clients into four distinct types and adaptively optimizing their local training based on data distribution characteristics and available computational resources. Extensive experiments on computer vision, natural language processing, and real-world tasks demonstrate that FedQS achieves the highest accuracy, attains the lowest loss, and ranks among the fastest in convergence speed, outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Our work bridges the gap between aggregation strategies in SAFL, offering a unified solution for stable, accurate, and efficient federated learning. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/bkjod/FedQS_.

cs.LG