Dad, Teacher, Computer Scientist, Unreasonable Optimist

Joined February 2012
22 Photos and videos
David Evans retweeted
1/ Most membership inference attacks (MIAs) have seemingly converged to black-box settings, driven by empirical evidence and theoretical folklore suggesting black-box access was optimal. But what if this assumption missed something critical? 😨 tl;dr? It did 🧡
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David Evans retweeted
Temporally shifted data splits in membership inference can be misleading ⚠️ Be cautious when interpreting these benchmarks!
1/6 A lot of us are grappling with peer review these days, but its worst manifestation is when prestigious conference awards overlook critical flaws. Case in point: #EMNLP2024’s Best Paper Award. I & @iamgroot42 wrote a blog on what went wrong: anshumansuri.com/blog/2024/c… 🧡
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David Evans retweeted
Wrote a blurb for my submission "adversarial rinsing" 😈🧼 to the 'Erasing the Invisible' competition organized by @bang_an_ @furongh & co - awesome job btw! πŸŽ‰ Ranked nowhere near the top lol but a great learning experience! anshumansuri.com/post/eti/

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David Evans retweeted
Best book to started is A Pragmatic Introduction to Secure Computation Despite working on MPC for almost 4 years, I refer to this pretty regularly and have my staff at both @hashcloak and @StoffelMPC read it. It's pretty accessible as long as you have high school to first 1 of uni math skills (calculus linear algebra) securecomputation.org/
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Thanks, @JaydeepBorkar! I should probably update that someday - its more than 20 years old now, but mostly still true. Even harder now for new students to get an email noticed with all the GPT-generated emails around now, but can still make it clear you've put in some effort.
Replying to @EugeneVinitsky
Something that worked for me when I was applying was following @UdacityDave blogpost on emailing potential advisors (uvasrg.github.io/prospective…) It has some great advice on doing your homework and writing a brief email :)
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David Evans retweeted
10 Oct 2024
I’m recruiting PhD students interested in trustworthy ML and ML for security this cycle! Please reach out via email anytime or find me at @acm_ccs next week. Retweets are greatly appreciated!
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David Evans retweeted
Meet Assistant Professor Fnu Suya. His research interests include the application of machine learning techniques to security-critical applications and the vulnerabilities of machine learning models in the presence of adversaries, generally known as trustworthy machine learning.
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David Evans retweeted
🌟 Join Our First Lego League Teams! πŸš€ πŸ”Ή Division 1: One spot open for Grades 5 and 6! πŸ”Ή Division 2: Three spots open for Grades 7 and 8! Don't miss the chance to be part of an exciting journey! πŸ€–
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David Evans retweeted
Does white-box access help with membership inference? πŸ€” tl;dr: Yes βœ… Come find Xiao (@xzhang_0427) at the High-dimensional Learning Dynamics (HiLD) Workshop at @icmlconf this Friday to learn more πŸ“ŠπŸ” Prior works (@alexsablay et al. proceedings.mlr.press/v97/sa…) theoretically show how black-box access is optimal for membership inference, and these findings seem to align with folklore and empirical observations around MIAs. However, the underlying assumptions for this theoretical result do not hold for models trained with SGD. We theoretically show that parameter access helps. Our theory also prescribes an attack that can be used for privacy auditing without any reference models. Read the full paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2406.11544 #ICML2024

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David Evans retweeted
Our MIA evaluation research for LLMs has been accepted at @COLM_conf! πŸ₯³ It's time to think beyond just exact-record membership for privacy audits. Hope to see you in Philly soon! Meanwhile, check out this fascinating collection of related works that have emerged recently πŸ‘‡
Our work on challenges and inconclusiveness of membership inference attacks on LLMs has been accepted to @COLM_conf!! arxiv.org/abs/2402.07841 This work has instigated new directions and many conversations on MIA evaluations, I will list them here in this thread, add to it!
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David Evans retweeted
We will be closed the week of the Fourth of July. Camps will start on July 8 at 8:30 am. Join us for coding and robotics camps for kids aged 6 to thirteen from July 8 to August 16. Register at: buff.ly/3UU8onG Happy Fourth of July! #SummerCamps #CodingRoboticCamps
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David Evans retweeted
29 Jun 2024
Replying to @UdacityDave
Thanks Dave, it was also an honor to be advised you and @Yuantest3 !
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Congratulations Suya! Its been a privilege to advise you, and excited to see all the great things you will do at UTK!
26 Jun 2024
πŸŽ‰ I'm thrilled to announce that I am joining the @EECS_UTK at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as an Assistant Professor this fall. Grateful for all the support from my mentors and colleagues throughout my academic journey.
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David Evans retweeted
The first two days of summer camp have been a smashing success! We still have spots available for next week, June 17 to June 21. Visit our website to sign-up buff.ly/3UU8onG . Hurry, spots are filling up quickly!
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David Evans retweeted
Excited to share our work on data minimization for ML! The principle of data minimization is a cornerstone of global data protection regulations, but how do we implement it in ML contexts? 🧡: Let's dive into some insights. πŸ”—: arxiv.org/abs/2405.19471
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David Evans retweeted
Dive into the universe of LEGO Spike Essential at our new location on 2171 Ivy Road, Charlottesville, Virginia. Join us from June 17 to 21, 8:30 AM - 1:00 PM or 5:00 PM, for children aged 6 and 7. Explore more at our website (buff.ly/457yAOJ) #LEGO #SpikeEssential
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David Evans retweeted
30 May 2024
As an incoming Assistant Professor @UVA CS, I invite applications for multiple PhD and internship positions! Seeking passionate individuals for interdisciplinary research in Software Engineering, Formal Methods, and Machine Learning. For more details, visit wenxiwang.github.io/recruit.…. Reach out if you are interested, and/or spread the word!

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David Evans retweeted
🌟 Dive into the world of coding this summer at Blue Ridge Boost! Let your child explore the fun and practical Python Camp in Charlottesville for ages 10-13. Engaging courses, expert instructors, and hands-on learning await! Sign up now for early bird discounts. #CodingAdventure
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David Evans retweeted
We're back from a lively break for the next session, starting with @iamgroot42 speaking about pitfalls in evaluating black-box attacks!
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David Evans retweeted
Super stoked about this work!! (interesting problem *and* superb collaborators 😍) Turns out certain LLM training characteristics (*and the way we think of membership for generative models) make MI hard! Read more at: iamgroot42.github.io/mimir.g… ( @mcduan01 @UdacityDave)

Was this sequence in the training dataset or not?? In new paper, we study why membership inference attacks show *near-random performance* on LLMs!! We also release a Python package for seamless MIA evaluation!! Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2402.07841 Repo: github.com/iamgroot42/mimir
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