← Search

Florian Tramer

18 accepted papers

2026

OptiFluence: Principled Design of Privacy Canaries

ICML 2026poster

Privacy auditing has emerged as a practical tool for empirically estimating training data leakage in machine learning models, in contrast to the provable but often overly pessimistic bounds provided by differential privacy analysis. A common strategy is to use membership inference attacks to detect …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Position: Anthropomorphic Misalignment Research Needs Stronger Evidence

ICML 2026oral

We argue that many Anthropomorphized Misalignment Research (AMR) studies need stronger evidence to ensure that they can provide a robust foundation for critical safety decisions, such as model deployment and regulation. By evaluating failure modes across different misalignment concepts, such as dece…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2023

(Certified!!) Adversarial Robustness for Free!

ICLR 2023poster

In this paper we show how to achieve state-of-the-art certified adversarial robustness to 2-norm bounded perturbations by relying exclusively on off-the-shelf pretrained models. To do so, we instantiate the denoised smoothing approach of Salman et al. by combining a pretrained denoising diffusion pr…

2023

Measuring Forgetting of Memorized Training Examples

ICLR 2023poster

Machine learning models exhibit two seemingly contradictory phenomena: training data memorization and various forms of forgetting. In memorization, models overfit specific training examples and become susceptible to privacy attacks. In forgetting, examples which appeared early in training are forgot…

Cited by 112SourcePDFScholar
2023

Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models

ICLR 2023top-25%

Large language models (LMs) have been shown to memorize parts of their training data, and when prompted appropriately, they will emit the memorized training data verbatim. This is undesirable because memorization violates privacy (exposing user data), degrades utility (repeated easy-to-memorize text…

Cited by 776SourcePDFScholar
2022

Data Poisoning Won’t Save You From Facial Recognition

ICLR 2022poster

Data poisoning has been proposed as a compelling defense against facial recognition models trained on Web-scraped pictures. Users can perturb images they post online, so that models will misclassify future (unperturbed) pictures. We demonstrate that this strategy provides a false sense of securi…

2022

Increasing Confidence in Adversarial Robustness Evaluations

NeurIPS 2022accept

Hundreds of defenses have been proposed to make deep neural networks robust against minimal (adversarial) input perturbations. However, only a handful of these defenses held up their claims because correctly evaluating robustness is extremely challenging: Weak attacks often fail to find adversarial…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2022

Large Language Models Can Be Strong Differentially Private Learners

ICLR 2022oral

Differentially Private (DP) learning has seen limited success for building large deep learning models of text, and straightforward attempts at applying Differentially Private Stochastic Gradient Descent (DP-SGD) to NLP tasks have resulted in large performance drops and high computational overhead. W…

2022

The Privacy Onion Effect: Memorization is Relative

NeurIPS 2022accept

Machine learning models trained on private datasets have been shown to leak their private data. Recent work has found that the average data point is rarely leaked---it is often the outlier samples that are subject to memorization and, consequently, leakage. We demonstrate and analyze an Onion Effect…

Cited by 122SourcePDFScholar
2021

Antipodes of Label Differential Privacy: PATE and ALIBI

NeurIPS 2021poster

We consider the privacy-preserving machine learning (ML) setting where the trained model must satisfy differential privacy (DP) with respect to the labels of the training examples. We propose two novel approaches based on, respectively, the Laplace mechanism and the PATE framework, and demonstrate t…

2021

Label-Only Membership Inference Attacks

ICML 2021spotlight

Membership inference is one of the simplest privacy threats faced by machine learning models that are trained on private sensitive data. In this attack, an adversary infers whether a particular point was used to train the model, or not, by observing the model’s predictions. Whereas current attack me…

2020

Fundamental Tradeoffs between Invariance and Sensitivity to Adversarial Perturbations

ICML 2020poster

Adversarial examples are malicious inputs crafted to induce misclassification. Commonly studied \emph{sensitivity-based} adversarial examples introduce semantically-small changes to an input that result in a different model prediction. This paper studies a complementary failure mode, \emph{invarianc…

2020

On Adaptive Attacks to Adversarial Example Defenses

NeurIPS 2020poster

Adaptive attacks have (rightfully) become the de facto standard for evaluating defenses to adversarial examples. We find, however, that typical adaptive evaluations are incomplete. We demonstrate that 13 defenses recently published at ICLR, ICML and NeurIPS---and which illustrate a diverse set of de…

2019

Slalom: Fast, Verifiable and Private Execution of Neural Networks in Trusted Hardware

ICLR 2019oral

As Machine Learning (ML) gets applied to security-critical or sensitive domains, there is a growing need for integrity and privacy for outsourced ML computations. A pragmatic solution comes from Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs), which use hardware and software protections to isolate sensitive c…