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Robin Staab

17 accepted papers

2026

Adaptive Generation of Bias-Eliciting Questions for LLMs

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are now widely deployed in user-facing applications, reaching hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Despite their widespread adoption, growing reliance on their outputs raises significant concerns, particularly as users may be exposed to model-inherent biases that dis…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Fewer Weights, More Problems: A Practical Attack on LLM Pruning

ICLR 2026poster

Model pruning, i.e., removing a subset of model weights, has become a prominent approach to reducing the memory footprint of large language models (LLMs) during inference. Notably, popular inference engines, such as vLLM, enable users to conveniently prune downloaded models before they are deployed.…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

LLM Fingerprinting via Semantically Conditioned Watermarks

ICLR 2026oral

Most LLM fingerprinting methods teach the model to respond to a few fixed queries with predefined atypical responses (keys). This memorization often does not survive common deployment steps such as finetuning or quantization, and such keys can be easily detected and filtered from LLM responses, ulti…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Watch your steps: Dormant Adversarial Behaviors that Activate upon LLM Finetuning

ICLR 2026oral

Finetuning open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) is standard practice for achieving task-specific performance improvements. Until now, finetuning has been regarded as a controlled and secure process in which training on benign datasets leads to predictable behaviors. In this paper, we demonstrate…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Discovering Spoofing Attempts on Language Model Watermarks

ICML 2025poster

LLM watermarks stand out as a promising way to attribute ownership of LLM-generated text. One threat to watermark credibility comes from spoofing attacks, where an unauthorized third party forges the watermark, enabling it to falsely attribute arbitrary texts to a particular LLM. Despite recent work…

2025

Mind the Gap: A Practical Attack on GGUF Quantization

ICML 2025poster

With the increasing size of frontier LLMs, post-training quantization has become the standard for memory-efficient deployment. Recent work has shown that basic rounding-based quantization schemes pose security risks, as they can be exploited to inject malicious behaviors into quantized models that r…

2025

MixAT: Combining Continuous and Discrete Adversarial Training for LLMs

NeurIPS 2025poster

Despite recent efforts in Large Language Model (LLM) safety and alignment, current adversarial attacks on frontier LLMs can still consistently force harmful generations. Although adversarial training has been widely studied and shown to significantly improve the robustness of traditional machine le…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Ward: Provable RAG Dataset Inference via LLM Watermarks

ICLR 2025poster

RAG enables LLMs to easily incorporate external data, raising concerns for data owners regarding unauthorized usage of their content. The challenge of detecting such unauthorized usage remains underexplored, with datasets and methods from adjacent fields being ill-suited for its study. We take sever…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

A Synthetic Dataset for Personal Attribute Inference

NeurIPS 2024poster

Recently powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) have become easily accessible to hundreds of millions of users world-wide. However, their strong capabilities and vast world knowledge do not come without associated privacy risks. In this work, we focus on the emerging privacy threat LLMs pose – the ab…

2024

Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy via Inference with Large Language Models

ICLR 2024spotlight

Current privacy research on large language models (LLMs) primarily focuses on the issue of extracting memorized training data. At the same time, models’ inference capabilities have increased drastically. This raises the key question of whether current LLMs could violate individuals’ privacy by infer…

2024

Private Attribute Inference from Images with Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

As large language models (LLMs) become ubiquitous in our daily tasks and digital interactions, associated privacy risks are increasingly in focus. While LLM privacy research has primarily focused on the leakage of model training data, it has recently been shown that LLMs can make accurate privacy-in…

2022

Bayesian Framework for Gradient Leakage

ICLR 2022poster

Federated learning is an established method for training machine learning models without sharing training data. However, recent work has shown that it cannot guarantee data privacy as shared gradients can still leak sensitive information. To formalize the problem of gradient leakage, we propose a th…