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Sarah Monazam Erfani

17 accepted papers

2026

Coarse-to-Fine Open-Set Graph Node Classification with Large Language Models

AAAI 2026technical

Developing open-set classification methods capable of classifying in-distribution (ID) data while detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is essential for deploying graph neural networks (GNNs) in open-world scenarios. Existing methods typically treat all OOD samples as a single class, despite r

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

On the Bayes Inconsistency of Disagreement Discrepancy Surrogates

ICLR 2026poster

Deep neural networks often fail when deployed in real-world contexts due to distribution shift, a critical barrier to building safe and reliable systems. An emerging approach to address this problem relies on _disagreement discrepancy_—a measure of how the disagreement between two models changes und…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Toward Universal and Transferable Jailbreak Attacks on Vision-Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Vision–language models (VLMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with vision encoders, enabling text generation conditioned on both images and text. However, this multimodal integration expands the attack surface by exposing the model to image-based jailbreaks crafted to induce harmful responses. E…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Cognitive Mirrors: Exploring the Diverse Functional Roles of Attention Heads in LLM Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in a variety of tasks, but remain largely opaque in terms of their internal mechanisms. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial to improve their reasoning abilities. Drawing inspiration from the interplay between neural proces…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Detecting Backdoor Samples in Contrastive Language Image Pretraining

ICLR 2025poster

Contrastive language-image pretraining (CLIP) has been found to be vulnerable to poisoning backdoor attacks where the adversary can achieve an almost perfect attack success rate on CLIP models by poisoning only 0.01\% of the training dataset. This raises security concerns on the current practice of…

2025

Fortifying Time Series: DTW-Certified Robust Anomaly Detection

NeurIPS 2025poster

Time-series anomaly detection is critical for ensuring safety in high-stakes applications, where robustness is a fundamental requirement rather than a mere performance metric. Addressing the vulnerability of these systems to adversarial manipulation is therefore essential. Existing defenses are larg…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Multi-level Certified Defense Against Poisoning Attacks in Offline Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Similar to other machine learning frameworks, Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) is shown to be vulnerable to poisoning attacks, due to its reliance on externally sourced datasets, a vulnerability that is exacerbated by its sequential nature. To mitigate the risks posed by RL poisoning, we extend c…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Position: Certified Robustness Does Not (Yet) Imply Model Security

ICML 2025oral

While certified robustness is widely promoted as a solution to adversarial examples in Artificial Intelligence systems, significant challenges remain before these techniques can be meaningfully deployed in real-world applications. We identify critical gaps in current research, including the paradox…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

X-Transfer Attacks: Towards Super Transferable Adversarial Attacks on CLIP

ICML 2025poster

As Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models are increasingly adopted for diverse downstream tasks and integrated into large vision-language models (VLMs), their susceptibility to adversarial perturbations has emerged as a critical concern. In this work, we introduce **X-Transfer**, a no…

2024

Et Tu Certifications: Robustness Certificates Yield Better Adversarial Examples

ICML 2024poster

In guaranteeing the absence of adversarial examples in an instance's neighbourhood, certification mechanisms play an important role in demonstrating neural net robustness. In this paper, we ask if these certifications can compromise the very models they help to protect? Our new *Certification Aware…

2024

LDReg: Local Dimensionality Regularized Self-Supervised Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Representations learned via self-supervised learning (SSL) can be susceptible to dimensional collapse, where the learned representation subspace is of extremely low dimensionality and thus fails to represent the full data distribution and modalities. Dimensional collapse ––– also known as the "under…

2024

Visual-Text Cross Alignment: Refining the Similarity Score in Vision-Language Models

ICML 2024poster

It has recently been discovered that using a pre-trained *vision-language model* (VLM), e.g., CLIP, to align a whole query image with several finer text descriptions generated by a large language model can significantly enhance zero-shot performance. However, in this paper, we empirically find that…

2023

Distilling Cognitive Backdoor Patterns within an Image

ICLR 2023poster

This paper proposes a simple method to distill and detect backdoor patterns within an image: \emph{Cognitive Distillation} (CD). The idea is to extract the ``minimal essence" from an input image responsible for the model's prediction. CD optimizes an input mask to extract a small pattern from the in…

2022

Double Bubble, Toil and Trouble: Enhancing Certified Robustness through Transitivity

NeurIPS 2022accept

In response to subtle adversarial examples flipping classifications of neural network models, recent research has promoted certified robustness as a solution. There, invariance of predictions to all norm-bounded attacks is achieved through randomised smoothing of network inputs. Today's state-of-the…

2021

$\alpha$-IoU: A Family of Power Intersection over Union Losses for Bounding Box Regression

NeurIPS 2021poster

Bounding box (bbox) regression is a fundamental task in computer vision. So far, the most commonly used loss functions for bbox regression are the Intersection over Union (IoU) loss and its variants. In this paper, we generalize existing IoU-based losses to a new family of power IoU losses that have…

2021

Exploring Architectural Ingredients of Adversarially Robust Deep Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2021poster

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. A range of defense methods have been proposed to train adversarially robust DNNs, among which adversarial training has demonstrated promising results. However, despite preliminary understandings developed for adversarial…

2021

Unlearnable Examples: Making Personal Data Unexploitable

ICLR 2021spotlight

The volume of "free" data on the internet has been key to the current success of deep learning. However, it also raises privacy concerns about the unauthorized exploitation of personal data for training commercial models. It is thus crucial to develop methods to prevent unauthorized data exploitatio…