About

I’m a computer science PhD student at Stanford AI Lab. I’m grateful to be advised by Percy Liang and Sanmi Koyejo. I’m part of Stanford NLP, Stanford ML, and Stanford Trustworthy AI Research (STAIR). I also worked with Dan Boneh at Applied Cryptography Group and did AI research at Google DeepMind.

I research language models, data & user privacy, and sometimes their intersection. Some past related projects: LLM data membership, machine unlearning, local-remote model collaboration, personalization, deploying distributed differentially private training to Android, and 1st-place at the US-UK Privacy-Enhancing Technologies Challenge.

Blog / Feedback / GitHub / Google Scholar / LinkedIn / Twitter

News and Olds

Research

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(*equal contribution, alphabetical/random authorship)
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UQ: Assessing Language Models on Unsolved Questions
Fan Nie*, Ken Ziyu Liu*, Zihao Wang, Rui Sun, Wei Liu, Weijia Shi, Huaxiu Yao, Linjun Zhang, Andrew Ng, James Zou, Sanmi Koyejo, Yejin Choi, Percy Liang, Niklas Muennighoff*
arXiv preprint
UQ-Platform live at uq.stanford.edu
PDF / BibTeX / Tweet
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Language Models May Verbatim Complete Text They Were Not Explicitly Trained On
Ken Ziyu Liu, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo*, Matthew Jagielski*, Peter Kairouz, Sanmi Koyejo, Percy Liang, Nicolas Papernot
ICML 2025
Spotlight
PDF / BibTeX / Slides / Poster / Tweet
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Exploring and Mitigating Adversarial Manipulation of Voting-Based Leaderboards
Yangsibo Huang, Milad Nasr, Anastasios Angelopoulos, Nicholas Carlini, Wei-Lin Chiang, Christopher A Choquette-Choo, Daphne Ippolito, Matthew Jagielski, Katherine Lee, Ken Ziyu Liu, Ion Stoica, Florian Tramer, Chiyuan Zhang
ICML 2025
Spotlight
PDF / BibTeX
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Machine Unlearning Doesn't Do What You Think: Lessons for Generative AI Policy, Research, and Practice
A Feder Cooper, Christopher A Choquette-Choo, Miranda Bogen, Matthew Jagielski, Katja Filippova, Ken Ziyu Liu, Alexandra Chouldechova, Jamie Hayes, Yangsibo Huang, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Ilia Shumailov, Eleni Triantafillou, Peter Kairouz, Nicole Mitchell, Percy Liang, Daniel E Ho, Yejin Choi, Sanmi Koyejo, Fernando Delgado, James Grimmelmann, Vitaly Shmatikov, Christopher De Sa, Solon Barocas, Amy Cyphert, Mark Lemley, Jennifer Wortman Vaughan, Miles Brundage, David Bau, Seth Neel, Abigail Z Jacobs, Andreas Terzis, Hanna Wallach, Nicolas Papernot, Katherine Lee
arXiv 2024
PDF / BibTeX
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Machine Unlearning in 2024
Ken Ziyu Liu
An edcuational and position piece
#1 trending post on Hacker News
Blog Post / BibTeX / Tweet / Hacker News / Podcast / Politico / Wall Street Journal
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On Fairness of Low-Rank Adaption of Large Models
Zhoujie Ding*, Ken Ziyu Liu*, Pura Peetathawatchai, Berivan Isik, Sanmi Koyejo
COLM 2024: Conference on Language Modeling
PDF / BibTeX / Code / Tweet
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Investigating Data Contamination for Pre-training Language Models
Minhao Jiang, Ken Ziyu Liu, Ming Zhong, Rylan Schaeffer, Siru Ouyang, Jiawei Han, Sanmi Koyejo
Tech Report
Best Paper Award & Oral Presentation at DPFM @ ICLR'24
PDF / BibTeX / Code / Tweet
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Differentially Private Adaptive Optimization with Delayed Preconditioners
Tian Li, Manzil Zaheer, Ziyu Liu, Sashank Reddi, Brendan McMahan, Virginia Smith
ICLR 2023: International Conference on Learning Representations
Oral Presentation at OPT 2022 @ NeurIPS'22
PDF / BibTeX / Code
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On Privacy and Personalization in Cross-Silo Federated Learning
Ziyu Liu, Shengyuan Hu, Zhiwei Steven Wu, Virginia Smith
NeurIPS 2022: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Underpins 1st-place solution at UK-US PETs Challenge
PDF / BibTeX / Code / Poster / Blog Post
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Motley: Benchmarking Heterogeneity and Personalization in Federated Learning
Shanshan Wu, Tian Li, Zachary Charles, Yu Xiao, Ziyu Liu, Zheng Xu, Virginia Smith
Preprint
Presented at FL-NeurIPS'22
PDF / BibTeX / Code
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The Skellam Mechanism for Differentially Private Federated Learning
Naman Agarwal, Peter Kairouz, Ziyu Liu
NeurIPS 2021: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Oral Presentation at PPML 2021 @ ACM CCS'21
Deployed to Android
PDF / BibTeX / Code / Talk 1 / Talk 2 / Poster / Slides
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The Distributed Discrete Gaussian Mechanism for Federated Learning with Secure Aggregation
Peter Kairouz, Ziyu Liu, Thomas Steinke
ICML 2021: International Conference on Machine Learning
Oral Presentation at TPDP 2021 @ ICML'21
Deployed to Android
Full PDF / Short PDF / BibTeX / Code / Talk / Poster / Slides
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Learning Implicit Credit Assignment for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Meng Zhou*, Ziyu Liu*, Pengwei Sui, Yixuan Li, Yuk Ying Chung
NeurIPS 2020: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
Presented at RL Theory Workshop @ ICML'20
PDF / BibTeX / Code
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Disentangling and Unifying Graph Convolutions for Skeleton-Based Action Recognition
Ziyu Liu, Hongwen Zhang, Zhenghao Chen, Zhiyong Wang, Wanli Ouyang
CVPR 2020: Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Oral Presentation
PDF / Supp / BibTeX / Demo / Code Star

Teaching & Mentoring

I love teaching! Most recently, I was part of the teaching team of AddisCoder 2023 🇪🇹, an intensive summer school in Ethiopia for middle/high school students interested in programming and computer science. I helped with student admissions, created lab exercises, gave lab lectures, and graded exams. I was also the main IT guy responsible for managing 100+ lab machines and making sure students can do exercises under poor technical infrastructure.

I’m also involved in the following teaching/mentoring activities:

While an undergrad at USyd, I was a teaching assistant (academic tutor) for the following classes:

(On research mentoring)

Experience

Google DeepMind, Mountain View CA, United States
Student Researcher, DeepMind Privacy/Security, better half of 2024
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Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), Stanford CA, United States
PhD student, 2023-Present
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Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, Pittsburgh PA, United States
Research Assistant (RI/MLD), 2021-2023
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Google Research (remote from Sydney)
AI Resident Researcher, 2020-2021 (Left early for grad school deferred from 2020)
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Facebook, Menlo Park CA, United States
Software Engineer Intern, Messenger/Instagram Ranking, Winter 2019/2020 (Summer in 🦘🇦🇺)
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Amazon Web Services, Sydney, Australia
Software Engineer Intern, Safety Engineering, Winter 2018/2019 (Summer in 🦘🇦🇺)
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Apple, Cupertino CA, United States
Software Engineer Intern, Core OS, Summer 2018
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Professional Service

  • Reviewer for COLM 2025: Conference on Language Modeling
  • Reviewer for ICML 2025: International Conference on Machine Learning
  • Reviewer for TMLR: Transactions on Machine Learning Research
  • Program Committee for Private ML-ICLR'24: Privacy Regulation and Protection in Machine Learning Workshop
  • Reviewer for ICML 2024: International Conference on Machine Learning
  • Reviewer for ICLR 2024: International Conference on Learning Representations
  • Program Committee for FL-ICML'23: Workshop on Federated Learning and Analytics in Practice
  • Reviewer for NeurIPS 2023: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
  • Reviewer for ICCV 2023: International Conference on Computer Vision
  • Reviewer for ICML 2023: International Conference on Machine Learning
  • Reviewer for CVPR 2023: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Reviewer for AISTATS 2023: International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
  • Reviewer for NeurIPS 2022: Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems
  • Reviewer for TIP 2022: IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
  • Reviewer for ECCV 2022: European Conference on Computer Vision
  • Reviewer for CVPR 2022: IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
  • Reviewer for IJCV 2021: International Journal of Computer Vision

☕ Misc


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