About

I’m a 2nd-year Computer Science PhD at Stanford AI Lab. I’m grateful to be advised by Percy Liang and Sanmi Koyejo. I’m part of Stanford NLP and Stanford Trustworthy AI Research (STAIR). I also worked with Dan Boneh at Applied Cryptography Group and did AI research at Google DeepMind.

I think about modern AI systems, user & data privacy, and their intersection. Some past related projects: LLM data membership, machine unlearning, local-remote model collaboration, personalization, distributed training, deploying distributed differential privacy to Android, and the 1st-place entry at the US-UK Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Challenge.

Anon Feedback / Blog / GitHub / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / Twitter

News and Olds

Research

Show Selected | Show All
(*equal contribution, alphabetical/random authorship)
Language Models May Verbatim Complete Text They Were Not Explicitly Trained On
Ken Ziyu Liu, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo*, Matthew Jagielski*, Peter Kairouz, Sanmi Koyejo, Percy Liang, Nicolas Papernot
ICML 2025
Spotlight
PDF / BibTeX / Tweet
Exploring and Mitigating Adversarial Manipulation of Voting-Based Leaderboards
Yangsibo Huang, Milad Nasr, Anastasios Angelopoulos, Nicholas Carlini, Wei-Lin Chiang, Christopher A Choquette-Choo, Daphne Ippolito, Matthew Jagielski, Katherine Lee, Ken Ziyu Liu, Ion Stoica, Florian Tramer, Chiyuan Zhang
ICML 2025
Spotlight
PDF / BibTeX
Machine Unlearning Doesn't Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy, Research, and Practice
A Feder Cooper, Christopher A Choquette-Choo, Miranda Bogen, Matthew Jagielski, Katja Filippova, Ken Ziyu Liu, Alexandra Chouldechova, Jamie Hayes, Yangsibo Huang, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Ilia Shumailov, Eleni Triantafillou, Peter Kairouz, Nicole Mitchell, Percy Liang, Daniel E Ho, Yejin Choi, Sanmi Koyejo, Fernando Delgado, James Grimmelmann, Vitaly Shmatikov, Christopher De Sa, Solon Barocas, Amy Cyphert, Mark Lemley, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Miles Brundage, David Bau, Seth Neel, Abigail Z Jacobs, Andreas Terzis, Hanna Wallach, Nicolas Papernot, Katherine Lee
arXiv 2024
PDF / BibTeX
Machine Unlearning in 2024
Ken Ziyu Liu
An edcuational and position piece
Top trending post on Hacker News
Blog Post / PDF version / BibTeX / Tweet / Hacker News / Podcast / Politico
On Fairness of Low-Rank Adaption of Large Models
Zhoujie Ding*, Ken Ziyu Liu*, Pura Peetathawatchai, Berivan Isik, Sanmi Koyejo
COLM 2024: Conference on Language Modeling
PDF / BibTeX / Code / Tweet
Investigating Data Contamination for Pre-training Language Models
Minhao Jiang, Ken Ziyu Liu, Ming Zhong, Rylan Schaeffer, Siru Ouyang, Jiawei Han, Sanmi Koyejo
Tech Report
Best Paper Award & Oral Presentation at DPFM @ ICLR'24
PDF / BibTeX / Code / Tweet
Differentially Private Adaptive Optimization with Delayed Preconditioners
Tian Li, Manzil Zaheer, Ziyu Liu, Sashank Reddi, Brendan McMahan, Virginia Smith
ICLR 2023: International Conference on Learning Representations
Oral Presentation at OPT 2022 @ NeurIPS'22
PDF / BibTeX / Code
On Privacy and Personalization in Cross-Silo Federated Learning
Ziyu Liu, Shengyuan Hu, Zhiwei Steven Wu, Virginia Smith
NeurIPS 2022: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Presented at TPDP 2022 @ ICML'22
PDF / BibTeX / Code / Poster / Blog Post
Motley: Benchmarking Heterogeneity and Personalization in Federated Learning
Shanshan Wu, Tian Li, Zachary Charles, Yu Xiao, Ziyu Liu, Zheng Xu, Virginia Smith
Preprint
Presented at FL-NeurIPS'22
PDF / BibTeX / Code
The Skellam Mechanism for Differentially Private Federated Learning
Naman Agarwal, Peter Kairouz, Ziyu Liu
NeurIPS 2021: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Oral Presentation at PPML 2021 @ ACM CCS'21
PDF / BibTeX / Code / Talk 1 / Talk 2 / Poster / Slides
The Distributed Discrete Gaussian Mechanism for Federated Learning with Secure Aggregation
Peter Kairouz, Ziyu Liu, Thomas Steinke
ICML 2021: International Conference on Machine Learning
Oral Presentation at TPDP 2021 @ ICML'21
Full PDF / Short PDF / BibTeX / Code / Talk / Poster / Slides
Learning Implicit Credit Assignment for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Meng Zhou*, Ziyu Liu*, Pengwei Sui, Yixuan Li, Yuk Ying Chung
NeurIPS 2020: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Presented at RL Theory Workshop @ ICML'20
PDF / BibTeX / Code
Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Ziyu Liu, Hongwen Zhang, Zhenghao Chen, Zhiyong Wang, Wanli Ouyang
CVPR 2020: Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Oral Presentation
PDF / Supp / BibTeX / Demo / Code Star

Teaching & Mentoring

I love teaching! Most recently, I was part of the teaching team of AddisCoder 2023 🇪🇹, an intensive summer school in Ethiopia for middle/high school students interested in programming and computer science. I helped with student admissions, created lab exercises, gave lab lectures, and graded exams. I was also the main IT guy responsible for managing 100+ lab machines and making sure students can do exercises under poor technical infrastructure.

I’m also involved in the following teaching/mentoring activities:

While an undergrad at USyd, I was a teaching assistant (academic tutor) for the following classes:

Experience

Google DeepMind, Mountain View CA, United States
Student Researcher, DeepMind Privacy/Security, better half of 2024
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), Stanford CA, United States
PhD student, 2023-Present
Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, Pittsburgh PA, United States
Research Assistant (RI/MLD), 2021-2023
Google Research (remote from Sydney)
AI Resident Researcher, 2020-2021 (Left early for grad school deferred from 2020)
Facebook, Menlo Park CA, United States
Software Engineer Intern, Messenger/Instagram Ranking, Winter 2019/2020 (Summer in 🦘🇦🇺)
Amazon Web Services, Sydney, Australia
Software Engineer Intern, Safety Engineering, Winter 2018/2019 (Summer in 🦘🇦🇺)
Apple, Cupertino CA, United States
Software Engineer Intern, Core OS, Summer 2018

Professional Service

  • Reviewer for COLM 2025: Conference on Language Modeling
  • Reviewer for ICML 2025: International Conference on Machine Learning
  • Reviewer for TMLR: Transactions on Machine Learning Research
  • Program Committee for Private ML-ICLR'24: Privacy Regulation and Protection in Machine Learning Workshop
  • Reviewer for ICML 2024: International Conference on Machine Learning
  • Reviewer for ICLR 2024: International Conference on Learning Representations
  • Program Committee for FL-ICML'23: Workshop on Federated Learning and Analytics in Practice
  • Reviewer for NeurIPS 2023: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
  • Reviewer for ICCV 2023: International Conference on Computer Vision
  • Reviewer for ICML 2023: International Conference on Machine Learning
  • Reviewer for CVPR 2023: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Reviewer for AISTATS 2023: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
  • Reviewer for NeurIPS 2022: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
  • Reviewer for TIP 2022: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
  • Reviewer for ECCV 2022: European Conference on Computer Vision
  • Reviewer for CVPR 2022: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Reviewer for IJCV 2021: International Journal of Computer Vision

☕ Misc


Visits since COVID: