Vinith Suriyakumar
MIT EECS, LIDS, IMES, Bridgewater Associates
I am a fifth year PhD student at MIT EECS where I am advised by Dr. Ashia Wilson and Dr. Marzyeh Ghassemi. I also collaborate frequently with Dr. Dylan Hadfield-Menell. I’m supported through a fellowship from Bridgewater Associates and AIA Lab led by Dr. Jas Sekhon where I also conduct research part-time.
Broadly, I’m interested in the privacy, security, and safety of machine learning. I’ve worked on many topics in these areas including differential privacy, auditing, algorithmic fairness, and unlearning.
These days, the goal of my research is to address open-weight model safety and security. This includes questions on safety pretraining, unlearning, robustness to tampering attacks, and intepretability.
My research advancing the privacy, security and safety of machine learning has received awards at NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, and FAccT:
- ICML 2022 Spotlight
- ICML 2023 Oral
- ICLR 2024 Oral
- FAccT 2024 Best Paper Award
- NeurIPS 2025 Spotlight
news
| Dec 2, 2025 | I’ll be a Visiting Student Researcher at Stanford with Dr. Sanmi Koyejo from February to June 2026. Afterwards, I’ll be interning at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs working on privacy and security research for AI agents under Dr. Kamalika Chaudhuri’s team from June to August 2026. |
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| Oct 18, 2025 | I gave two invited talks recently on open-weight model safety and unlearning at the MITAI Conference and the Bridgewater AIA Distinguished Speaker Series. |
| Sep 18, 2025 |
Our work uncovering and formalizing spurious correlations originating from syntactic shortcuts in LLMs, Learning the Wrong Lessons: Syntatic-Domain Shortcuts in Language Models Shaib, was awarded a Spotlight at NeurIPS 2025! This work provides a new perspective on different forms of memorization and uncovers a new type of jailbreak in LLMs. |