log in  |  register  |  feedback?  |  help  |  web accessibility
PhD Defense: Enhancing Trust and Transparency in Language Model Development and Deployment
John Kirchenbauer
IRB-4105 https://umd.zoom.us/j/93826897686, Passcode: tandt4llms
Wednesday, May 6, 2026, 10:00 am-12:00 pm
  • You are subscribed to this talk through .
  • You are watching this talk through .
  • You are subscribed to this talk. (unsubscribe, watch)
  • You are watching this talk. (unwatch, subscribe)
  • You are not subscribed to this talk. (watch, subscribe)
Abstract

Over the last five years, the rapid increase in the capability and ubiquity of language models has revealed a clear and pressing need to incorporate transparency enhancing technologies into these systems. In the first part of this thesis we introduce a method for watermarking the outputs of language models and showcase how this technology can enable robust content provenance in realistic deployment scenarios. Next, we present studies on training data attribution and memorization in language models while shedding light on how web-scale pretraining presents unique and fundamental challenges in this space. To enable more controlled experiments in these research domains we develop a synthetic dataset pipeline that generates realistic but semantically isolated documents and questions suitable for further studies on memorization and knowledge acquisition. Finally, motivated by prescient issues at the intersection of intellectual property law and language model training, we conclude by demonstrating that proactive, selective watermarking by content creators or model providers can make training data membership testing---determining whether or not their data or model outputs were included in a training dataset---a more tractable problem.

Bio

John Kirchenbauer is a fifth-year PhD student in Prof. Tom Goldstein’s lab at the University of Maryland. He spent the first part of his PhD working on techniques for discerning whether the thing you’re currently reading or looking at was created by a human or generated by an AI system. More broadly, his research has explored robustness, reliability, safety, and scalability in deep learning with a long-standing interest in improving our understanding of how a generative model's training data impacts its behavior. Upon completion of his PhD, he will start a postdoc with Prof. Colin Raffel at the Vector Institute in Toronto.

Examining Committee Chair: Dr. Tom Goldstein

Dean's Representative: Dr. Jennifer Golbeck

Members: 

Dr. Hal Daumé

Dr. Furong Huang

Dr. Daphne Ippolito (Special Member)

This talk is organized by Migo Gui