Zehua Cheng

I build AI that reasons over data it is not allowed to see.

That splits into two programmes. The Rhizome is learning and inference across a mesh with no trusted centre — no node holds the data, no operator holds the model, and the guarantees come from cryptography and mechanism design rather than from anyone’s reputation. The Episteme is reasoning constrained by explicit mathematical structure rather than by fluency — factor graphs, automata, symmetry groups and curvature, imposed on the network instead of hoped for. Both aim at the same target: autonomous agents that work in biomedicine and finance, where a well-formed falsehood is not a lesser truth but a liability with a fluent surface.

I am a Professor in the Department of Information Security at Korea University, and an Associate Fellow at the University of Oxford, where I took my Ph.D. in Computer Science. I also lead AI research at FLock.io.

News

08/2026 - TWO papers accepted for IEEE ICDM 2026!

08/2026 - SIX papers accepted for CIKM 2026! (5 for Episteme, 1 for Rhizome). 3 ORAL, 3 POSTER!

07/2026 - Invited to serve as Area Chair for EACL 2027 (ARR August 2026).

07/2026 - Invited to serve as Area Chair for SIGKDD 2027.

06/2026 - ONE paper for Rhizome accepted for ICPP 2026! Congratulations to ALL Authors!

05/2026 - ONE paper for Episteme accepted for UAI 2026 (Oral)! Congratulations to ALL Authors!

05/2026 - THREE papers for Episteme accepted for ECML-PKDD 2026! Congratulations to ALL Authors!

04/2026 - Invited Guest Lecture on AI Safety and Governance in the Era of LLM at COMP60272 AI Security & Privacy at the University of Manchester.

04/2026 - Invited to serve as Area Chair for EMNLP 2026 (ARR May 2026).

04/2026 - Invited Lecture on Building Reliable and Trustworthy LLM at Korea University!

04/2026 - ONE paper for Rhizome has been accepted in ICMR 2026 (Long)! Congratulations to ALL Authors!

04/2026 - TWO papers for Episteme have been accepted in ACL 2026! (One Main, One Findings)! Congratulations to ALL Authors!

03/2026 - Invited to serve as Area Chair for NeurIPS 2026.

03/2026 - One (And the first) paper for Episteme has been accepted in ICME 2026! Congratulations to ALL Authors!

03/2026 - I am honored to announce that I will be serving as Vice Chair for the 6th Digital Twin International Conference (DigiTwin 2026). The event will be held in a hybrid format from August 4–8, 2026, at the University of Oxford, UK. DigiTwin is a premier global platform dedicated to advancing digital twin concepts, technologies, and interdisciplinary applications. I look forward to helping organize this prestigious event and collaborating with leading researchers and industry experts. Learn more about the conference here.

01/2026 - Invited to serve as Area Chair for ACL 2026.

12/2025 - I received the 🏆 Best Paper Award (Industrial) from WI-IAT 2025! Congratulations to ALL Authors!

Open Opportunities:

FLock.io Oxford Phil in Computer Science Scholarship: Security of AI Systems

Selected Awards:

WI-IAT 2025 Best Industrial Paper Award - Scaling Decentralized Learning with FLock
AAAI 2024 Global Competition on Math Problem Solving and Reasoning Track 1 - Solution without API (3rd Prize) and Track 2 - Solution without API (2nd Prize).
Second Prize at KDD Cup 2024 - OAG Challenge AQA.
Third Prize at NeurIPS 2023: Open Catalyst Challenge
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2022) Travel Grant
Championship at AWS Self-driving car racing challenge in 2021
Championship at ACM. MM GrandChallenge in Multi-Modal Video Identification Track in 2019