I am currently (Sep. 2024) a 5th-year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at San Antonio, advised by Dr. Yanmin Gong.

My research interests include Cybersecurity, Foundation Models, Edge Intelligence, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence.

🔥 News

• 2025.01: Our paper “pFedSAM: Secure Federated Learning Against Backdoor Attacks via Personalized Sharpness-Aware Minimization” was accepted by IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC 2025).

• 2024.12: Our paper “Federated Adaptive Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Heterogeneous Quantization and LoRA” was accepted by IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM 2025). (Acceptance ratio: 18.65%)

• 2024.10: Our paper “Heterogeneity-Aware Cooperative Federated Edge Learning with Adaptive Computation and Communication Compression” was accepted by IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC).

📝 Publications

See Google Scholar for a comprehensive list of publications.

Selected Papers in Refereed Journals:

• Heterogeneity-Aware Cooperative Federated Edge Learning with Adaptive Computation and Communication Compression, Zhenxiao Zhang, Zhidong Gao, Yuanxiong Guo, Yanmin Gong, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 2024.

• Communication and Energy Efficient Wireless Federated Learning with Intrinsic Privacy, Zhenxiao Zhang, Yuanxiong Guo, Yuguang Fang, Yanmin Gong, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing (TDSC), 2023.

• Scalable and Low-Latency Federated Learning with Cooperative Mobile Edge Networking, Zhenxiao Zhang, Zhidong Gao, Yuanxiong Guo, Yanmin Gong, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 2022.

Selected Papers in Refereed Inferences:

• Federated Adaptive Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models with Heterogeneous Quantization and LoRA, Zhidong Gao*, Zhenxiao Zhang*, Yuanxiong Guo, Yanmin Gong, IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2025. (Acceptance ratio: 18.65%)
• pFedSAM: Secure Federated Learning Against Backdoor Attacks via Personalized Sharpness-Aware Minimization, Zhenxiao Zhang, Yuanxiong Guo, Yanmin Gong, IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (ICC), 2025.

Preprints:

• DP$^2$-FedSAM: Enhancing Differentially Private Federated Learning Through Personalized Sharpness-Aware Minimization, Zhenxiao Zhang, Yuanxiong Guo, Yanmin Gong. arXiv preprint, 2024.
• FedPT: Federated Proxy-Tuning of Large Language Models on Resource-Constrained Edge Devices, Zhidong Gao, Yu Zhang, Zhenxiao Zhang, Yanmin Gong, Yuanxiong Guo. arXiv preprint, 2024.
• Online Client Scheduling and Resource Allocation for Efficient Federated Edge Learning, Zhidong Gao, Zhenxiao Zhang, Yu Zhang, Tongnian Wang, Yanmin Gong, Yuanxiong Guo. arXiv preprint, 2024.

📖 Educations

• 2020.09 - 2025.07 (now), University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), San Antonio, USA.
• 2017.09 - 2020.07, Master of Science, East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST), Shanghai, China.
• 2013.09 - 2017.07, Bachelor of Science, East China University of Science and Technology (ECUST), Shanghai, China.

✅ Professional Services

Journal Reviewer:

• IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC), 2023, 2024.
• IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (TIFS), 2023, 2024.
• Computers & Security, 2023, 2024.
• Expert Systems with Applications (ESWA), 2024.
• Cluster & Computing, 2024.
• Computing, 2024.
• Mobile Networks and Application, 2024.
• iScience, 2025.

Conference Reviewer:

• IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), 2023, 2024.
• IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2024, 2025.
• IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), 2024.

Technical Program Committee Member:

• Workshop on Generative AI for Smart and Connected Health: Innovations, Challenges, and Applications (GenAI4SCH), IEEE/ACM CHASE, 2025.

🏆 Honors and Awards

• Graduate School Professional Development Award, UTSA, USA, 2024.
• CPS-IoT Week Student Travel Grant, National Science Foundation, 2023.
• Teaching Assistant Work Award, ECUST, China, 2018.

🌍 Outreach

• Poster presentation at New In ML workshop of NeurIPS, New Orleans, USA, 2023.
• Volunteer at CPS-IoT Week, San Antonio, USA, 2023.