Nirav Diwan

PhD @ UIUC

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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. This is an open call for collaboration! Feel free to send me an email to talk about ideas, projects, collaborations, or research questions.

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 Workship@AAAI 2025!
Jul 22, 2025 πŸ₯‡ 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 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.

Selected Publications View all →

NeurIPS
PurpCode: Reasoning for Safer Code Generation

Jiawei Liu*, Nirav Diwan*, Zhe Wang*, Haoyu Zhai, Xiaona Zhou, Kiet A. Nguyen, Tianjiao Yu, Muntasir Wahed, Yinlin Deng, Hadjer Benkraouda, Yuxiang Wei, Lingming Zhang, Ismini Lourentzou, Gang Wang

39th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems

πŸ₯‡ Winner of Amazon Nova AI Challenge 2025

USENIX
It Doesn't Look Like Anything to Me: Using Diffusion Model to Subvert Visual Phishing Detectors

Qingying Hao, Nirav Diwan, Ying Yuan, Giovanni Apruzzese, Mauro Conti, Gang Wang

33rd USENIX Security Symposium, 2024

Paper β˜…
ACL
Fingerprinting Finetuned Language Models in the Wild

Nirav Diwan, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Zubair Shafiq

59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Findings), 2021

Dean's Thesis Appreciation Award at IIIT-Delhi

Paper β˜