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• Jun

  5

  Jiahao Yu CS PhD Final Defense: Advancing Cybersecurity through Explainable AI

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  9:00 AM

  EVENT DETAILS

  There is growing momentum—from industry, government, and academia—to use AI for automating cybersecurity tasks. Yet practitioners remain skeptical: while 87% of security leaders expect AI to enhance their roles, only 9% believe it will replace significant parts of them. This gap stems from two fundamental barriers: limited capability and lack of trust. In this talk, I present my research on addressing these barriers through explainable AI. I first introduce StateMask, a method that automatically identifies critical decision steps in AI agent trajectories, enabling security professionals to understand why an AI-generated patch succeeded or failed. A user study with 41 experienced developers shows that 89% find our explanations aligned with their reasoning. I then present GPO, which leverages these explanations to synthesize high-quality training data without expensive expert annotation, thereby improving model capability. GPO-trained open-source models achieve performance competitive with leading commercial models on vulnerability patching, and its extension, EntroPO, ranks 1st on SWE-Bench Lite among all open-weight models. I conclude by discussing future directions toward building AI systems that are robust to imperfect data, trusted by security professionals, and capable of tackling real-world cybersecurity challenges.

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  TIME Friday, June 5, 2026 at 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

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  CONTACT Jensen Smith    jensen.smith@northwestern.edu EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)

• Jun

  12

  CSSI End of Year BBQ

  Department of Computer Science (CS)

  5:00 PM

  EVENT DETAILS

  Hi CS++ PhD students, faculty, staff, post-docs,

  We will be hosting a BBQ to celebrate the end of this academic year!

  When? Friday, June 12, 5-7 pm
  Where? North side of Evanston Centennial park

  We will be cooking up American BBQ classics with plenty of snacks and cold drinks to go around (vegetarian and vegan food included).

  RSVP HERE

  Please RSVP by 5 pm on Thursday, June 11, so we can prepare enough food for everyone.

  We have an RSVP list so that folks (signed in) can see who else is going. If you don’t see a friend or labmate signed up, make sure to reach out and invite them!

  Looking forward to seeing y’all there!

  Tommy, Ziyang, Yuchen, Maojiang, Alex, Melissa on behalf of CSSI

  Register Now

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  TIME Friday, June 12, 2026 at 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

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  CONTACT Computer Science Social Initiative    cssi@U.NORTHWESTERN.EDU EMAIL

  CALENDAR Department of Computer Science (CS)