Nirav Diwan
PhD @ UIUC
I am a 2nd year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Gang Wang in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. I study security risks in foundation model training and deployment.
Recently, I co-led the creation of PurpCode, which is the first reasoning model for cybersafety, winning the Amazon Nova AI Challenge (2025).
Internship. I am looking for both Industrial and Academic Internships for Summer 2026 in the areas of Machine Learning, and Security & Privacy. Feel free to reach out!
Collaboration. I am actively looking to work with undergrads and MS students! Feel free to send me an email with the title [Attention] to ask about contributing.
Industry experience
Prior Research Experience
News
| Jan 2, 2026 | Our simple evaluation study on using LLMs for scraping by everyday users is now accepted at AICS Workshop@AAAI 2025! |
| Jul 22, 2025 | π₯ Our work PurpCode, the first reasoning model for secure code generation developed using Deliberative Alignment, won the Amazon Nova AI Challenge ($250k prize)! |
| Jul 22, 2025 | PurpCode is now accepted at NeurIPS 2025! See you in San Deigo! |
| Dec 1, 2024 | My summer internship work at LG AI Research has been accepted at AAAI Good Data Workshop 2025. |
| Sep 16, 2024 | Our proposal for the Amazon Trusted AI Challenge (Grant - $250,000) got accepted. |
| Aug 23, 2024 | Officially started my PhD at UIUC! |
| May 29, 2024 | Joined LG AI Research as a research intern in the Bi-lingual LLM Team! |
| May 11, 2024 | Graduated with my MS CS at UIUC! |
| Mar 10, 2024 | Selected to represent UIUC at the Catalyzing Advocacy in Science and Engineering Workshop in Washington! |
| Feb 6, 2024 | I will in Philadelphia for USENIX Security Symposium! |
| Feb 6, 2024 | Our work highlighting the risk of Diffusion Models for evading online phishing detectors has been accepted at USENIX Security Symposium! |
| Oct 17, 2023 | Submitted our work at USENIX Security Symposium! |
| Jun 5, 2023 | Joined the Generative AI Team at Ema team as an Applied Science Intern! |
| Aug 22, 2022 | Started working as a Teaching Assistant for CS124 Introduction to Computer Science (Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023). |
| Aug 15, 2022 | Joined the research-track MS CS program at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign! |
| Jun 1, 2022 | Our work on Identifying Anomalous Users in the YouTube BlackMarket has been accepted at AAAI - ICWSM. |
| Sep 1, 2021 | Joined the ProVoice team at Prodigal Technologies as a Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer. |
| Jun 21, 2021 | Honoured to recieve the Deanβs Thesis Appreciation Award at IIIT Delhi! |
| Jun 21, 2021 | Graduated with B. Tech degree in Computer Science from IIIT Delhi. |
| Jun 1, 2021 | Our work on Watermarking Fine-tuned Language Model Generated text has been accepted at ACL (Findings). |
| Nov 1, 2020 | RecipeDB designed has been accepted at Database: The Journal of Biological Databases and Curation (Oxford university Press) (Impact Factor = 5.8). |
| Aug 1, 2020 | Started working as a Teaching Assistant for CS563 Machine Learning (Graduate) Course at IIITD (Fall 2020). |
| Mar 1, 2020 | The Information Retrieval model designed for RecipeDB has been accepted at DECOR Workshop at ICDE. |
Selected Publications View all β
Fingerprinting Finetuned Language Models in the Wild
Dean's Thesis Appreciation Award at IIIT-Delhi