Nirav Diwan
PhD @ UIUC
I am a 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 also collaborate with Prof. Varun Chandrasekaran and Prof. Huan Zhang. I am interested in security risks of foundation model training and deployment.
Prior to this, I completed my undergraduate studies from IIIT-Delhi, where I had the good fortune of working with Prof. Tanmoy Chakraborty (now at IIT Delhi), and Prof. Zubair Shafiq (at UC Davis), and Prof. Ganesh Bagler.
Internship. I am looking for both industrial and academic internships in Machine Learning, and S&P. Feel free to reach out!
Collaboration. I am always looking to work with undergrads and MS students! Feel free to send me an email with the title [Together] in the subject line!
Industry experience
Prior Research Experience
News
| Jul 6, 2026 | CoT-Guard has been selected for an oral presentation at AdvML-Frontiers × CoTMA Workshop at COLM 2026! Tweet |
| May 6, 2026 | We release CoT-Guard a 4B model that outperforms larger models (e.g GPT-5.4, GPT5-mini) for CoT Monitoring! |
| May 1, 2026 | Our work on Extractable Memorization from Differentially Private LLM is now accepted at Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP) Workshop 2025! See you in Boston! |
| Apr 1, 2026 | Passed my Quals — Officially a PhD candidate now! |
| Mar 7, 2026 | Released a blog post on extracting training data from VaultGemma - the first DP-SGD trained LLM. |
| 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 | 🥇 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. |