Visual Computing Seminar: Addressing the Unexpected - Anomaly Detection and AI Safety

Abstract:

While AI models are becoming an ever-increasing part of our lives, our understanding of their behavior in unexpected situations is drifting even further out of reach. This gap poses significant risks to users, model owners, and society at large.

In the first part of the talk, I will overview my research on detecting unexpected phenomena with and within deep learning models. Specifically, detecting (i) anomalous samples, (ii) unexpected model behavior, and (iii) unexpected security threats. In the second part of the talk, I will dive into my recent research on a specific type of unexpected security threat: attacks on image watermarks. I will review such attacks and present my recent work toward addressing them. I will conclude with a discussion of future research directions.

Bio: 

Niv Cohen is a postdoctoral researcher at the school of Computer Science & Engineering at New York University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University in 2024. His research interests include representation learning, computer vision, and AI safety. He is a recipient of the VATAT Scholarship for Outstanding Postdoctoral Fellows in Data Science and the 2024 Blavatnik Prize for Outstanding Israeli Doctoral Students in Computer Science.