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
- May 2025: Two papers accepted as Spotlights at ICML 2025: training set inclusion and leaderboard manipulation
- Mar 2025: Excited to release our paper that challenges $n$-gram training set inclusion in LLMs
- Oct 2024: Gave a guest lecture on intro to ML privacy at Northeastern University CS7375 (slides)
- Jul/Aug 2024: Gave three talks at Google DeepMind around LLM training set inclusion, privacy, and unlearning, respectively
- May 2024: Wrote a long post on machine unlearning (tweet); the field is rapidly evolving and clarity is much needed
- Jun 2024: Press coverage and interview by Politico
- May 2024: Talked about unlearning as a guest on The Data Exchange Podcast
- May 2024: Top trending post on Hacker News
- May 2024: Best paper award at the ICLR'24 DPFM Workshop.
- Aug 2023: Taught programming & algorithms in Ethiopia as part of AddisCoder 🇪🇹!
- July 2023: Gave a talk at the NITRD Privacy R&D Interagency Working Group of the US government
- June 2023: Gave a talk about model personalization at SWIFT
- May 2023: Gave a talk about our entry to the PETs challenge at the Royal Society in London, UK
- Mar 2023: I led our awesome CMU team ("puffle") to win 1st place at the US-UK Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) Prize Challenge, Pandemic Forecasting Track (USD $120,000)
- Mar 2023: See news by White House, UK Government, Summit for Democracy, DrivenData, NSF, and CMU
- May 2023: Wrote a blog post about it on ML@CMU. See the extended version if you're feeling adventurous.
- Mar 2023: Our research on distributed DP [1,2] is officially deployed to Android and featured on the Google AI blog
Research
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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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 |
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Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), Stanford CA, United States PhD student, 2023-Present |
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Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, Pittsburgh PA, United States Research Assistant (RI/MLD), 2021-2023 |
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Google Research (remote from Sydney) AI Resident Researcher, 2020-2021 (Left early for grad school deferred from 2020) |
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Facebook, Menlo Park CA, United States Software Engineer Intern, Messenger/Instagram Ranking, Winter 2019/2020 (Summer in 🦘🇦🇺) |
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Amazon Web Services, Sydney, Australia Software Engineer Intern, Safety Engineering, Winter 2018/2019 (Summer in 🦘🇦🇺) |
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Apple, Cupertino CA, United States Software Engineer Intern, Core OS, Summer 2018 |
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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
- I'm supported in part by Stanford School of Engineering Fellowship
- While not feeling the AGI, I try to read, travel, do olympic weightlifting, waltz (sometimes polka, lindy hop), bake cheesecakes, Dota 2, among other things
- I co-organized the weekly lunch/seminar for Stanford ML group
- I performed waltz/polka as part of the Stanford Viennese Ball 2025 Openning Committee
- Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, Instagram, Goodreads
- My Erdős number is 4 via three paths
- Consider using JAX! It's a beautiful thing
- Check out cs-sop.org if you're a prospective CS PhD applicant; I have benefited from this initiative and I have shared my statement there too
Visits since COVID: