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El-Mahdi El-Mhamdi

8 accepted papers

2026

Variance-Reduced $(\varepsilon, \delta)-$Unlearning using Forget Set Gradients

ICML 2026poster

In machine unlearning, $(\varepsilon,\delta)-$unlearning is a popular framework that provides formal guarantees on the effectiveness of the removal of a subset of training data, the \emph{forget set}, from a trained model. For strongly convex objectives, existing first-order methods achieve $(\varep…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Winter Soldier: Backdooring Language Models at Pre-Training with Indirect Data Poisoning

ICLR 2026poster

The pre-training of large language models (LLMs) relies on massive text datasets sourced from diverse and difficult-to-curate origins. Although membership inference attacks and hidden canaries have been explored to trace data usage, such methods rely on *regurgitation* of training data, which LM pro…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Data Taggants: Dataset Ownership Verification Via Harmless Targeted Data Poisoning

ICLR 2025poster

Dataset ownership verification, the process of determining if a dataset is used in a model's training data, is necessary for detecting unauthorized data usage and data contamination. Existing approaches, such as backdoor watermarking, rely on inducing a detectable behavior into the trained model on…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

Position: Stop treating `AGI' as the north-star goal of AI research

ICML 2025poster

The AI research community plays a vital role in shaping the scientific, engineering, and societal goals of AI research. In this position paper, we argue that focusing on the highly contested topic of 'artificial general intelligence' ('AGI') undermines our ability to choose effective goals. We ident…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Targeted Data Poisoning for Black-Box Audio Datasets Ownership Verification

ICASSP 2025accepted

Protecting the use of audio datasets is a major concern for data owners, particularly with the recent rise of audio deep learning models. While watermarks can be used to protect the data itself, they do not allow to identify a deep learning model trained on a protected dataset. In this paper, we ada…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Incentivized Learning in Principal-Agent Bandit Games

ICML 2024poster

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the agent. However, the principal can influence the agent's decisi…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Unravelling in Collaborative Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Collaborative learning offers a promising avenue for leveraging decentralized data. However, collaboration in groups of strategic learners is not a given. In this work, we consider strategic agents who wish to train a model together but have sampling distributions of different quality. The collabora…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

On the Strategyproofness of the Geometric Median

AISTATS 2023poster

The geometric median, an instrumental component of the secure machine learning toolbox, is known to be effective when robustly aggregating models (or gradients), gathered from potentially malicious (or strategic) users. What is less known is the extent to which the geometric median incentivizes dish…