TML Lab (EPFL)

Theory of Machine Learning Lab at @EPFL led by Nicolas Flammarion. We develop algorithmic & theoretical tools to better understand ML & make it more robust.

[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

Do you think LLM hallucinations are solved?

📢 We introduce HalluHard: a challenging multi-turn, open-ended hallucination benchmark. Even the most recent frontier LLMs like Opus 4.5 with web search hallucinate very frequently on our set of challenging examples.

[ELLIS @ELLISforEurope]

👏 Give a big round of applause to our 2025 PhD Award Winners!

The two main winners are: @ZhijingJin & @maksym_andr.

Two runners-up were selected additionally: @SiweiZhang13 & @elias_frantar

Learn even more about each outstanding scientist: https://t.co/3Pry7NnAYn

[francesco croce @fra__31]

Happy to share that I've started as an assistant professor at @AaltoUniversity and ELLIS Institute Finland!

I'll recruit students via the ELLIS PhD Program https://t.co/WXLbi7BiZD to work on multimodal learning, robustness, visual reasoning... feel free to reach out!

[TML Lab (EPFL) @tml_lab]

Exciting opportunity! Want to join us as a postdoc? Apply for the EPFL AI Center Fellowship: https://t.co/maIovIwDUQ

[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

Accepted at NeurIPS 2025 Datasets and Benchmarks Track as a *spotlight*! See you in San Diego :-)

[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

🚨Excited to release OS-Harm! 🚨

The safety of computer use agents has been largely overlooked.

We created a new safety benchmark based on OSWorld for measuring 3 broad categories of harm:
1. deliberate user misuse,
2. prompt injections,
3. model misbehavior.

[francesco croce @fra__31]

📃 In our new paper, we introduce FuseLIP, an encoder for multimodal embedding.

We use early fusion of modalities to train a single transformer on contrastive + masked (multimodal) modeling loss

More details👇

[Hao Zhao @H_aoZhao]

🚨Don't miss out on my PhD application!🚨

Finally completed all of my PhD applications🎄. I foresee a high level of anxiety while waiting for interviews and decisions. I want to take this opportunity to summarize what I've done and what I hope to accomplish during my PhD.

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[EPFL @EPFL_en]

🔍 New research from our school demonstrates that even the most recent Large Language Models (LLMs), despite undergoing safety training, remain vulnerable to simple input manipulations that can cause them to behave in unintended or harmful ways.
https://t.co/CPvPNkGAEo

[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

🚨 So, why do we need weight decay in modern deep learning? 🚨

The camera-ready version of our NeurIPS 2024 paper is now on arXiv (a major update compared to the first version).

Weight decay is traditionally viewed as a regularization method, but its effect in the overtraining regime is quite subtle and its interaction with the implicit regularization effect of SGD plays a crucial role.

In the undertraining regime (e.g., in LLM pretraining), however, the effect of weight decay is totally different: it sets an implicit learning rate schedule for AdamW and enables stable training with bfloat16 precision. This explains why weight decay is still widely used for LLM training with standard optimizers, such as AdamW.

This is joint work with @dngfra, @adityavardhanv, @tml_lab.

[Marcel Salathé @marcelsalathe]

Mindblowing: EPFL PhD student @maksym_andr, winner of best CS thesis award, showed that leading #AI models are not robust to even simple adaptive jailbreaking attacks. Indeed, he managed to jailbraik all models with a 100% success rate 🤯

Tonight, after winning the Patrick Denantes Memorial Prize, he showed how his work has informed the development of Gemini 1.5 - and gave a shoutout to @EPFL_en as a perfect place to do such work.

Truly inspiring! And he's on the faculty job market this season - catch him if you can 🏃‍♂️‍➡️

Jailbraking paper: https://t.co/0VPxXzxQ7N

About Maksym: https://t.co/jRnIxTVmtb

[EPFL Research Office @EPFL_ReO]

📢 The @EPFL_AI_Center Postdoctoral Fellowships call is now open!
💡Are you a postdoctoral researcher interested in collaborative and interdisciplinary research on #AI topics?
✏️Apply now until 29 November 2024 (17:00 CET).
👉More info: https://t.co/ehntfMvXUg

[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

🚨Excited to share our new paper!🚨

We reveal a curious generalization gap in the current refusal training approaches: simply reformulating a harmful request in the past tense (e.g., "How to make a Molotov cocktail?" to "How did people make a Molotov cocktail?") is often sufficient to jailbreak many state-of-the-art LLMs.

For example, the success rate of this simple attack on GPT-4o increases from 1% using direct requests to 88% using 20 past tense reformulation attempts with GPT-4 as a jailbreak judge.

Our findings highlight that the widely used alignment techniques—such as SFT, RLHF, and adversarial training—employed to align the studied models can be brittle and do not always generalize as intended.

Paper: https://t.co/mdIfJEnyk1
Code: https://t.co/kt7pKG2J17

(joint work with Nicolas Flammarion @tml_lab)

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[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

🆕We will present a short version of our adaptive attack paper https://t.co/XV9uEg3m3E at the ICML '24 NextGenAISafety Workshop. See some of you there!

🚨We've also just released the v2 of the paper on arXiv. Main updates:
- more models: Llama-3, Phi-3, Nemotron-4-340B (100% attack success rate on all of them),
- jailbreak artifacts for (almost) all attacks are available as jsons: https://t.co/dm6RTuBqQr,
- evaluation of generalization to different jailbreak judges: Llama-3-70B and Llama Guard 2 in addition to GPT-4 and rule-based judge,
- new experiments: convergence plots over iterations, ablation on the suffix length for random search.

I hope you'll appreciate our final table below - it took a while to do all these evaluations :-)

(Joint work with @fra__31 and @tml_lab.)

[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

Super excited to share that I successfully defended my PhD thesis "Understanding Generalization and Robustness in Modern Deep Learning" today 👨‍🎓

A huge thanks to the thesis examiners @SebastienBubeck, @zicokolter, and @KrzakalaF, jury president Rachid Guerraoui, and, of course, Nicolas @tml_lab for all the supervision during these years!

Seems like my 5-year journey at EPFL slowly comes to its end :-) Very excited for what comes next!

[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

Llama-3 is absolutely impressive, but is it more resilient to adaptive jailbreak attacks compared to Llama-2? 🤔

Not much. The same approach as in our recent work https://t.co/XV9uEg3m3E leads to 100% attack success rate.

The code and logs of the attack are now available: https://t.co/YRrsFs5cbO.

Some observations specific for Llama-3:
- It's the only model that instead of outputting directly 'Sure, ...', prefers to output the xml tag '<text>\nSure, ...' (which is due to our usage of XML tags in our prompt template). Thus, we target token '<' with random search instead of token 'Sure'.
- Logprobs of target tokens ('<' or 'Sure') are extremely small at the start (-20), but nonetheless random search still shows gradual progress (but requires a lot of iterations when starting from a generic initialization).
- If the model starts to generate 'Sure', it never goes back to the ‘safe’ mode (which was often the case for Llama-2).
- The utility/quality of jailbreaks is higher than for many other models (which makes sense since the model is much more capable).
- Self-transfer works remarkably well as shown on the plot below and is key for query efficiency and perfect attack success rates.

[Patrick Chao @patrickrchao]

Are you interested in jailbreaking LLMs? Have you ever wished that jailbreaking research was more standardized, reproducible, or transparent?

Check out JailbreakBench, an open benchmark and leaderboard for Jailbreak attacks and defenses on LLMs!

https://t.co/GttNBL9RYL
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[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

Very excited about this: our team led by @fra__31 won the SatML trojan detection competition (method: simple random search + heuristic to reduce the search space)

Interestingly, the final score (-33.4) is very close to the score on the real trojans (-37.7) RLHFed into the LLMs!

[Etienne Boursier @eboursie]

Training dynamics of ReLU networks is back! Many works point out to a mysterious early alignment phase. While this phase has obvious perks for implicit bias, it can also lead to harder optimization and even convergence towards spurious stationary points. Let me explain 🧵

[Maksym Andriushchenko @maksym_andr]

So, what really matters for instruction fine-tuning?

Surprisingly, simply fine-tuning on the *longest* examples is an extremely strong baseline for alignment of LLMs.

Really excited to share our new work: https://t.co/1G5UBFsFn0. Full story below!

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