I am a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst, advised by Amir Houmansadr. My general research interest lies in trustworthy machine learning, with a current focus on various aspects of trustworthy generative AI, including large language models and multimodal models. I obtained my bachelor’s degree from Sharif University of Technology.

🤝 Open to Collaboration

Curious about how to break generative models? Me too. I’m happy to chat, brainstorm, or collaborate on new ideas around LLM and multimodal model vulnerabilities. Just shoot me an email: anaseh (at) umass.edu.

News

• July 11, 2025: Our new preprint, “Exploiting Leaderboards for Large-Scale Distribution of Malicious Models”, is out.
• June 11, 2025: Our paper, “Backdooring Bias (B²) into Stable Diffusion Models”, was accepted at the 2025 USENIX.
• May 19, 2025: I returned to Oracle Labs as a Research Intern this summer.
• May 1, 2025: Our paper, “Riddle Me This! Stealthy Membership Inference for Retrieval-Augmented Generation”, was accepted at the 2025 CCS.
• February 5, 2025: Our new preprint, “OverThink: Slowdown Attacks on Reasoning LLMs”, is out.
• February 1, 2025: Our new preprint, “Riddle Me This! Stealthy Membership Inference for Retrieval-Augmented Generation”, is out.
• January 20, 2025: Our new preprint, “Synthetic Data Can Mislead Evaluations: Membership Inference as Machine Text Detection”, is out.
• September 16, 2024: 🔦 Our paper, “Iteratively Prompting Multimodal LLMs to Reproduce Natural and AI-Generated Images”, was selected for an oral spotlight presentation at the 2024 COLM (top 2%).
• August 30, 2024: Our paper, “Diffence: Fencing Membership Privacy With Diffusion Models”, was accepted at the 2025 NDSS.
• July 10, 2024: Our paper, “Iteratively Prompting Multimodal LLMs to Reproduce Natural and AI-Generated Images”, was accepted at the 2024 COLM.
• May 20, 2024: I started a new position as a Research Intern at Oracle, where I am working on membership inference attacks in LLMs.
• May 17, 2024: I received my Master’s degree from, and subsequently advanced to PhD candidate.
• May 6, 2024: 🌟 I received the Distinction Award for Portfolio Excellence from the Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
• March 15, 2024: I presented a talk titled “Stealing the decoding algorithms of language models”, at the 2024 New England Security Day.
• December 22, 2023: Our paper, “Memory Triggers: Unveiling Memorization in Text-To-Image Generative Models through Word-Level Duplication”, was accepted at the 2024 PPAI.
• November 30, 2023: 🏆 Our paper, “Stealing the decoding algorithms of language models”, won a Distinguished Paper Award at the 2023 CCS.
• May 8, 2023: Our paper, “Stealing the decoding algorithms of language models”, was accepted at the 2023 CCS.