EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Mislav Balunovic
dblp:231/7686
· DBLP profile ↗
23ranked-venue papers
8as first author
17since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-7024-7688ORCID · reported
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 20 · 8 first-author · 15 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 3 · 3 since 2021Security and privacy · 2 · 1 since 2021Software engineering, systems software and programming languages · 1 · 1 since 2021Theory of computation · 1 · 1 since 2021
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Language Models are Advanced AnonymizersabstractRecent privacy research on large language models (LLMs) has shown that they achieve near-human-level performance at inferring personal data from online texts. With ever-increasing model capabilities, existing text anonymization methods are currently lacking behind regulatory requirements and adversarial threats. In this work, we take two steps to bridge this gap: First, we present a new setting for evaluating anonymization in the face of adversarial LLM inferences, allowing for a natural measurement of anonymization performance while remedying some of the shortcomings of previous metrics. Then, within this setting, we develop a novel LLM-based adversarial anonymization framework leveraging the strong inferential capabilities of LLMs to inform our anonymization procedure. We conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation of adversarial anonymization across 13 LLMs on real-world and synthetic online texts, comparing it against multiple baselines and industry-grade anonymizers. Our evaluation shows that adversarial anonymization outperforms current commercial anonymizers both in terms of the resulting utility and privacy. We support our findings with a human study (n=50) highlighting a strong and consistent human preference for LLM-anonymized texts. Robin Staab, Mark Vero, Mislav Balunovic, Martin T. Vechev |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2025 | MathConstruct: Challenging LLM Reasoning with Constructive ProofsabstractWhile Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance in mathematics, existing math benchmarks come with significant limitations. Many focus on problems with fixed ground-truth answers, and are often saturated due to problem simplicity or the viability of guessing or memorization. Crucially, they capture only a narrow subset of relevant math problems. To address this research gap, we introduce MathConstruct, a new benchmark of 127 challenging problems sourced from various math competitions, which targets constructive proofs, a widely encountered problem type requiring the construction of mathematical objects with specific properties. These proofs are particularly suitable for LLM evaluation, as solution correctness can be easily verified. Our automated verifiers also enable MathConstruct to generate problem variations, used to evaluate robustness. State-of-the-art LLMs solve only 41% of MathConstruct problems, highlighting its complexity and importance for LLM evaluation. Mislav Balunovic, Jasper Dekoninck, Nikola Jovanovic 0001, Ivo Petrov, Martin T. Vechev |
ICML | 1 |
| 2025 | MathArena: Evaluating LLMs on Uncontaminated Math CompetitionsabstractThe rapid advancement of reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs) has led to notable improvements on mathematical benchmarks. However, many of the most commonly used evaluation datasets (e.g., AIME 2024) are widely available online, making it difficult to disentangle genuine reasoning from potential memorization. Furthermore, these benchmarks do not evaluate proof-writing capabilities, which are crucial for many mathematical tasks.To address this, we introduce MathArena, a new benchmark based on the following key insight: recurring math competitions provide a stream of high-quality, challenging problems that can be used for real-time evaluation of LLMs. By evaluating models as soon as new problems are released, we effectively eliminate the risk of contamination.Using this framework, we find strong signs of contamination in AIME 2024. Nonetheless, evaluations on harder competitions, such as CMIMC 2025, demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities in top-performing models.MathArena is also the first benchmark for proof-writing capabilities. On IMO 2025, top models achieve slightly less than 40\%, demonstrating both notable progress and significant room for improvement.So far, we have evaluated over $50$ models across seven competitions, totaling $162$ problems. As an evolving benchmark, MathArena will continue to track the progress of LLMs on newly released competitions, ensuring rigorous and up-to-date evaluation of mathematical reasoning. Mislav Balunovic, Jasper Dekoninck, Ivo Petrov, Nikola Jovanovic 0001, Martin T. Vechev |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2024 | Beyond Memorization: Violating Privacy via Inference with Large Language ModelsabstractCurrent privacy research on large language models (LLMs) primarily focuses on the issue of extracting memorized training data. At the same time, models’ inference capabilities have increased drastically. This raises the key question of whether current LLMs could violate individuals’ privacy by inferring personal attributes from text given at inference time. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study on the capabilities of pretrained LLMs to infer personal attributes from text. We construct a dataset consisting of real Reddit profiles, and show that current LLMs can infer a wide range of personal attributes (e.g., location, income, sex), achieving up to 85% top-1 and 95% top-3 accuracy at a fraction of the cost (100x) and time (240x) required by humans. As people increasingly interact with LLM-powered chatbots across all aspects of life, we also explore the emerging threat of privacy-invasive chatbots trying to extract personal information through seemingly benign questions. Finally, we show that common mitigations, i.e., text anonymization and model alignment, are currently ineffective at protecting user privacy against LLM inference. Our findings highlight that current LLMs can infer personal data at a previously unattainable scale. In the absence of working defenses, we advocate for a broader discussion around LLM privacy implications beyond memorization, striving for stronger and wider privacy protection. Robin Staab, Mark Vero, Mislav Balunovic, Martin T. Vechev |
ICLR | 3 |
| 2024 | CuTS: Customizable Tabular Synthetic Data GenerationabstractPrivacy, data quality, and data sharing concerns pose a key limitation for tabular data applications. While generating synthetic data resembling the original distribution addresses some of these issues, most applications would benefit from additional customization on the generated data. However, existing synthetic data approaches are limited to particular constraints, e.g., differential privacy (DP) or fairness. In this work, we introduce CuTS, the first customizable synthetic tabular data generation framework. Customization in CuTS is achieved via declarative statistical and logical expressions, supporting a wide range of requirements (e.g., DP or fairness, among others). To ensure high synthetic data quality in the presence of custom specifications, CuTS is pre-trained on the original dataset and fine-tuned on a differentiable loss automatically derived from the provided specifications using novel relaxations. We evaluate CuTS over four datasets and on numerous custom specifications, outperforming state-of-the-art specialized approaches on several tasks while being more general. In particular, at the same fairness level, we achieve 2.3% higher downstream accuracy than the state-of-the-art in fair synthetic data generation on the Adult dataset. Mark Vero, Mislav Balunovic, Martin T. Vechev |
ICML | 2 |
| 2024 | AgentDojo: A Dynamic Environment to Evaluate Prompt Injection Attacks and Defenses for LLM AgentsabstractAI agents aim to solve complex tasks by combining text-based reasoning with external tool calls.Unfortunately, AI agents are vulnerable to prompt injection attacks where data returned by external tools hijacks the agent to execute malicious tasks.To measure the adversarial robustness of AI agents, we introduce AgentDojo, an evaluation framework for agents that execute tools over untrusted data.To capture the evolving nature of attacks and defenses, AgentDojo is not a static test suite, but rather an extensible environment for designing and evaluating new agent tasks, defenses, and adaptive attacks.We populate the environment with 97 realistic tasks (e.g., managing an email client, navigating an e-banking website, or making travel bookings), 629 security test cases, and various attack and defense paradigms from the literature.We find that AgentDojo poses a challenge for both attacks and defenses: state-of-the-art LLMs fail at many tasks (even in the absence of attacks), and existing prompt injection attacks break some security properties but not all. We hope that AgentDojo can foster research on new design principles for AI agents that solve common tasks in a reliable and robust manner. Edoardo Debenedetti, Jie Zhang 0107, Mislav Balunovic, Luca Beurer-Kellner, Marc Fischer 0002, Florian Tramèr |
NeurIPS | 3 |
| 2024 | From Principle to Practice: Vertical Data Minimization for Machine LearningabstractAiming to train and deploy predictive models, organizations collect large amounts of detailed client data, risking the exposure of private information in the event of a breach. To mitigate this, policymakers increasingly demand compliance with the data minimization (DM) principle, restricting data collection to only that data which is relevant and necessary for the task. Despite regulatory pressure, the problem of deploying machine learning models that obey DM has so far received little attention. In this work, we address this challenge in a comprehensive manner. We propose a novel vertical DM (vDM) workflow based on data generalization, which by design ensures that no full-resolution client data is collected during training and deployment of models, benefiting client privacy by reducing the attack surface in case of a breach. We formalize and study the corresponding problem of finding generalizations that both maximize data utility and minimize empirical privacy risk, which we quantify by introducing a diverse set of policy-aligned adversarial scenarios. Finally, we propose a range of baseline vDM algorithms, as well as Privacy-aware Tree (PAT), an especially effective vDM algorithm that outperforms all baselines across several settings. We plan to release our code as a publicly available library, helping advance the standardization of DM for machine learning. Overall, we believe our work can help lay the foundation for further exploration and adoption of DM principles in real-world applications. Robin Staab, Nikola Jovanovic 0001, Mislav Balunovic, Martin T. Vechev |
SP | 3 |
| 2023 | FARE: Provably Fair Representation Learning with Practical CertificatesabstractFair representation learning (FRL) is a popular class of methods aiming to produce fair classifiers via data preprocessing. Recent regulatory directives stress the need for FRL methods that provide practical certificates, i.e., provable upper bounds on the unfairness of any downstream classifier trained on preprocessed data, which directly provides assurance in a practical scenario. Creating such FRL methods is an important challenge that remains unsolved. In this work, we address that challenge and introduce FARE (Fairness with Restricted Encoders), the first FRL method with practical fairness certificates. FARE is based on our key insight that restricting the representation space of the encoder enables the derivation of practical guarantees, while still permitting favorable accuracy-fairness tradeoffs for suitable instantiations, such as one we propose based on fair trees. To produce a practical certificate, we develop and apply a statistical procedure that computes a finite sample high-confidence upper bound on the unfairness of any downstream classifier trained on FARE embeddings. In our comprehensive experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that FARE produces practical certificates that are tight and often even comparable with purely empirical results obtained by prior methods, which establishes the practical value of our approach. Nikola Jovanovic 0001, Mislav Balunovic, Dimitar I. Dimitrov, Martin T. Vechev |
ICML | 2 |
| 2023 | TabLeak: Tabular Data Leakage in Federated LearningabstractWhile federated learning (FL) promises to preserve privacy, recent works in the image and text domains have shown that training updates leak private client data. However, most high-stakes applications of FL (e.g., in healthcare and finance) use tabular data, where the risk of data leakage has not yet been explored. A successful attack for tabular data must address two key challenges unique to the domain: (i) obtaining a solution to a high-variance mixed discrete-continuous optimization problem, and (ii) enabling human assessment of the reconstruction as unlike for image and text data, direct human inspection is not possible. In this work we address these challenges and propose TabLeak, the first comprehensive reconstruction attack on tabular data. TabLeak is based on two key contributions: (i) a method which leverages a softmax relaxation and pooled ensembling to solve the optimization problem, and (ii) an entropy-based uncertainty quantification scheme to enable human assessment. We evaluate TabLeak on four tabular datasets for both FedSGD and FedAvg training protocols, and show that it successfully breaks several settings previously deemed safe. For instance, we extract large subsets of private data at $>$90% accuracy even at the large batch size of 128. Our findings demonstrate that current high-stakes tabular FL is excessively vulnerable to leakage attacks. Mark Vero, Mislav Balunovic, Dimitar I. Dimitrov, Martin T. Vechev |
ICML | 2 |
| 2022 | Latent Space Smoothing for Individually Fair Representations
Momchil Peychev, Anian Ruoss, Mislav Balunovic, Maximilian Baader, Martin T. Vechev |
ECCV (13) | 3 |
| 2022 | Bayesian Framework for Gradient Leakage
Mislav Balunovic, Dimitar I. Dimitrov, Robin Staab, Martin T. Vechev |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2022 | Fair Normalizing Flows
Mislav Balunovic, Anian Ruoss, Martin T. Vechev |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2022 | LAMP: Extracting Text from Gradients with Language Model PriorsabstractRecent work shows that sensitive user data can be reconstructed from gradient updates, breaking the key privacy promise of federated learning. While success was demonstrated primarily on image data, these methods do not directly transfer to other domains such as text. In this work, we propose LAMP, a novel attack tailored to textual data, that successfully reconstructs original text from gradients. Our attack is based on two key insights: (i) modelling prior text probability via an auxiliary language model, guiding the search towards more natural text, and (ii) alternating continuous and discrete optimization which minimizes reconstruction loss on embeddings while avoiding local minima via discrete text transformations. Our experiments demonstrate that LAMP is significantly more effective than prior work: it reconstructs 5x more bigrams and $23\%$ longer subsequences on average. Moreover, we are first to recover inputs from batch sizes larger than 1 for textual models. These findings indicate that gradient updates of models operating on textual data leak more information than previously thought. Mislav Balunovic, Dimitar I. Dimitrov, Nikola Jovanovic 0001, Martin T. Vechev |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2021 | Efficient Certification of Spatial RobustnessabstractRecent work has exposed the vulnerability of computer vision models to vector field attacks. Due to the widespread usage of such models in safety-critical applications, it is crucial to quantify their robustness against such spatial transformations. However, existing work only provides empirical robustness quantification against vector field deformations via adversarial attacks, which lack provable guarantees. In this work, we propose novel convex relaxations, enabling us, for the first time, to provide a certificate of robustness against vector field transformations. Our relaxations are model-agnostic and can be leveraged by a wide range of neural network verifiers. Experiments on various network architectures and different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our method. Anian Ruoss, Maximilian Baader, Mislav Balunovic, Martin T. Vechev |
AAAI | 3 |
| 2021 | Scalable Polyhedral Verification of Recurrent Neural NetworksabstractAbstract We present a scalable and precise verifier for recurrent neural networks, calledProverbased on two novel ideas: (i) a method to compute a set of polyhedral abstractions for the non-convex and non-linear recurrent update functions by combining sampling, optimization, and Fermat’s theorem, and (ii) a gradient descent based algorithm for abstraction refinement guided by the certification problem that combines multiple abstractions for each neuron. UsingProver, we present the first study of certifying a non-trivial use case of recurrent neural networks, namely speech classification. To achieve this, we additionally develop custom abstractions for the non-linear speech preprocessing pipeline. Our evaluation shows thatProversuccessfully verifies several challenging recurrent models in computer vision, speech, and motion sensor data classification beyond the reach of prior work. Wonryong Ryou, Mislav Balunovic, Gagandeep Singh 0001, Andrei-Marian Dan, Martin T. Vechev |
CAV (1) | 3 |
| 2021 | Robustness Certification for Point Cloud ModelsabstractThe use of deep 3D point cloud models in safety-critical applications, such as autonomous driving, dictates the need to certify the robustness of these models to real-world trans-formations. This is technically challenging, as it requires a scalable verifier tailored to point cloud models that handles a wide range of semantic 3D transformations. In this work, we address this challenge and introduce 3DCertify, the first verifier able to certify the robustness of point cloud models. 3DCertify is based on two key insights: (i) a generic relaxation based on first-order Taylor approximations, applicable to any differentiable transformation, and (ii) a precise relaxation for global feature pooling, which is more complex than pointwise activations (e.g., ReLU or sigmoid) but commonly employed in point cloud models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of 3DCertify by performing an extensive evaluation on a wide range of 3D transformations (e.g., rotation, twisting) for both classification and part segmentation tasks. For example, we can certify robustness against rotations by ±60° for 95.7% of point clouds, and our max pool relaxation increases certification by up to 15.6%. Tobias Lorenz 0002, Anian Ruoss, Mislav Balunovic, Gagandeep Singh 0001, Martin T. Vechev |
ICCV | 3 |
| 2021 | Certify or Predict: Boosting Certified Robustness with Compositional Architectures
Mark Niklas Müller, Mislav Balunovic, Martin T. Vechev |
ICLR | 2 |
| 2020 | Adversarial Training and Provable Defenses: Bridging the Gap
Mislav Balunovic, Martin T. Vechev |
ICLR | 1 |
| 2020 | Learning Certified Individually Fair RepresentationsabstractFair representation learning provides an effective way of enforcing fairness constraints without compromising utility for downstream users. A desirable family of such fairness constraints, each requiring similar treatment for similar individuals, is known as individual fairness. In this work, we introduce the first method that enables data consumers to obtain certificates of individual fairness for existing and new data points. The key idea is to map similar individuals to close latent representations and leverage this latent proximity to certify individual fairness. That is, our method enables the data producer to learn and certify a representation where for a data point all similar individuals are at l-infinity distance at most epsilon, thus allowing data consumers to certify individual fairness by proving epsilon-robustness of their classifier. Our experimental evaluation on five real-world datasets and several fairness constraints demonstrates the expressivity and scalability of our approach. Anian Ruoss, Mislav Balunovic, Marc Fischer 0002, Martin T. Vechev |
NeurIPS | 2 |
| 2019 | Learning to Fuzz from Symbolic Execution with Application to Smart ContractsabstractFuzzing and symbolic execution are two complementary techniques for discovering software vulnerabilities. Fuzzing is fast and scalable, but can be ineffective when it fails to randomly select the right inputs. Symbolic execution is thorough but slow and often does not scale to deep program paths with complex path conditions. In this work, we propose to learn an effective and fast fuzzer from symbolic execution, by phrasing the learning task in the framework of imitation learning. During learning, a symbolic execution expert generates a large number of quality inputs improving coverage on thousands of programs. Then, a fuzzing policy, represented with a suitable architecture of neural networks, is trained on the generated dataset. The learned policy can then be used to fuzz new programs. We instantiate our approach to the problem of fuzzing smart contracts, a domain where contracts often implement similar functionality (facilitating learning) and security is of utmost importance. We present an end-to-end system, ILF (for Imitation Learning based Fuzzer), and an extensive evaluation over >18K contracts. Our results show that ILF is effective: (i) it is fast, generating 148 transactions per second, (ii) it outperforms existing fuzzers (e.g., achieving 33% more coverage), and (iii) it detects more vulnerabilities than existing fuzzing and symbolic execution tools for Ethereum. Mislav Balunovic, Nodar Ambroladze, Petar Tsankov, Martin T. Vechev |
CCS | 2 |
| 2019 | DL2: Training and Querying Neural Networks with LogicabstractWe present DL2, a system for training and querying neural networks with logical constraints. Using DL2, one can declaratively specify domain knowledge constraints to be enforced during training, as well as pose queries on the model to find inputs that satisfy a set of constraints. DL2 works by translating logical constraints into a loss function with desirable mathematical properties. The loss is then minimized with standard gradient-based methods. We evaluate DL2 by training networks with interesting constraints in unsupervised, semi-supervised and supervised settings. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that DL2 is more expressive than prior approaches combining logic and neural networks, and its loss functions are better suited for optimization. Further, we show that for a number of queries, DL2 can find the desired inputs in seconds (even for large models such as ResNet-50 on ImageNet). Marc Fischer 0002, Mislav Balunovic, Dana Drachsler-Cohen, Timon Gehr, Ce Zhang 0001, Martin T. Vechev |
ICML | 2 |
| 2019 | Certifying Geometric Robustness of Neural NetworksabstractThe use of neural networks in safety-critical computer vision systems calls for their robustness certification against natural geometric transformations (e.g., rotation, scaling). However, current certification methods target mostly norm-based pixel perturbations and cannot certify robustness against geometric transformations. In this work, we propose a new method to compute sound and asymptotically optimal linear relaxations for any composition of transformations. Our method is based on a novel combination of sampling and optimization. We implemented the method in a system called DeepG and demonstrated that it certifies significantly more complex geometric transformations than existing methods on both defended and undefended networks while scaling to large architectures. Mislav Balunovic, Maximilian Baader, Gagandeep Singh 0001, Timon Gehr, Martin T. Vechev |
NeurIPS | 1 |
| 2018 | Learning to Solve SMT FormulasabstractWe present a new approach for learning to solve SMT formulas. We phrase the challenge of solving SMT formulas as a tree search problem where at each step a transformation is applied to the input formula until the formula is solved. Our approach works in two phases: first, given a dataset of unsolved formulas we learn a policy that for each formula selects a suitable transformation to apply at each step in order to solve the formula, and second, we synthesize a strategy in the form of a loop-free program with branches. This strategy is an interpretable representation of the policy decisions and is used to guide the SMT solver to decide formulas more efficiently, without requiring any modification to the solver itself and without needing to evaluate the learned policy at inference time. We show that our approach is effective in practice - it solves 17% more formulas over a range of benchmarks and achieves up to 100x runtime improvement over a state-of-the-art SMT solver. Mislav Balunovic, Pavol Bielik, Martin T. Vechev |
NeurIPS | 1 |