Nirav Diwan
PhD @ UIUC
I am a first-year Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. I am working with Prof. Gang Wang at the intersection of Security and Machine Learning. I am particularly interested in practical adversarial attacks on large language models (LLMs). My work has been published at ACL, USENIX Security Symposium, ICWSM, and the ICDE Workshop.
I recently completed my research-track M.S. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with Prof. Gang Wang in the area of Adversarial Machine Learning with a focus on Foundation Models. Previously, I worked on watermarking fine-tuned LLM-generated text (ACL Findings ‘21) with Prof. Zubair Shafiq (UC Davis) and Prof. Tanmoy Chakraborty (IIT Delhi).
Before my MS, I did my B.Tech. degree in Computer Science from IIIT Delhi in June 2021, where I worked in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Graphs, and Security & Privacy (S&P). I was a member of LCS2 and the Complex Systems Lab. I worked on identifying anomalies in the YouTube Blackmarket Network using graphs (ICWSM ‘22). I also led the information retrieval team for RecipeDB - a worldwide repository of recipes (ICDE Workshop, Oxford University Press).
I interned at LG AI Research in summer 2024 with the Bi-lingual LLM team. I worked on alignment algorithms for LLMs with Tolga Ergen and Honglak Lee. Prior to this, I was an Applied Science intern at Ema Unlimited last summer (2023). I worked with the Generative AI Team on converting natural language to SQL Commands. I have also worked as a Natural Language Processing (NLP) Engineer at Prodigal Technologies for a year, where I focused on problems of Dialogue State Tracking (DST), Information Retrieval (IR), and optimizing search queries with a specific focus on finance-related conversations. Additionally, I interned at TCS Research and Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH Delhi).
Affiliations & Internships
News
Aug 23, 2024 | Officially started my PhD at UIUC! |
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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 be at USENIX 2024 at Philadelphia 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 Dean’s 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. |