Nils Lukas

Contact

Bio

2024–now	Asst. Prof	MBZUAI
2019–24	PhD	U. Waterloo
2016–18	MSc	RWTH-Aachen

Guten Tag, I’m Nils 👋. I’m an Assistant Professor of Machine Learning at MBZUAI in Abu Dhabi leading the Secure, Private, Open and Trustworthy AI lab. I have received Waterloo's 2024 Alumni Gold medal, my PhD thesis received the Top Mathematics Doctoral Prize and in 2025 I won an Amazon Research Award. In 2026 I founded Adherence, a startup building enterprise AI agents.

My research focuses on (i) secure, (ii) private and (iii) strategic machine learning. I am interested in researching methods to make large ML system accessible to millions of users in a responsible way. This includes topics such as content watermarking, privacy-preserving inference, AI safety & security and developing conversational agents with social intelligence.

I have taught the following courses at MBZUAI

S'26: ML8509 – Collaborative ML (w/ S. Horvath)
F'25: ML8502 – ML Security
S'25: ML807 – Federated Learning (w/ P. Vepakomma)
F'24: ML818 – Trustworthy ML (w/ K. Nandakumar, P. Vepakomma)

Please reach out if you are interested in seeing the course material.

Scholar GitHub LinkedIn CV

> We have open positions in the

for talented students! Please apply via e-mail (my personal email or spot.ai@mbzuai.ac.ae).

Latest News (see all)

Publications by venue: ICML ×4 🌟 ICLR ×4 🌟 USENIX ×3 NeurIPS ×2 IEEE S&P ×2 ACL ×2 CVPR ×1 🏆 ECCV ×1 EMNLP ×1 EACL ×1

Jun'26 🔥 SPQR, a benchmark for the safety alignment of text-to-image models under benign fine-tuning, was accepted at ECCV'26 (Datasets & Benchmarks).

May'26 I gave a talk on 'AI Safety: Alignment, Oversight and Deception' at the ADIA Lab & UGR Summer School in Granada, Spain.

Apr'26 🔥 Two papers accepted at ICML'26: Collaborative Threshold Watermarking and CoRe: Collaborative Reasoning via Cross Teaching.

Apr'26 🔥 Two papers accepted at ACL'26, one at the main conference and one at Findings.

Feb'26 🔥 One accepted paper at CVPR'26 as an 🏆 Oral (top 0.8%).

Feb'26 I attended our US AI Forum in San Francisco, then traveled to Washington DC for a CRA career event.

Feb'26 I am a PI on a grant from TII (Technology Innovation Institute), together with Salem Lahlou, to research GFlowNets for fuzzing of agentic applications.

Jan'26 🔥 Two accepted papers. DP-Fusion to ICLR'26 and SD-E^2 to EACL (Findings).

Dec'25 🥇 I received an Amazon Research Award

Sept'25 I was invited by Hady Elsahar to give a remote talk to the watermarking team at Meta (FAIR) in Paris on 'Adaptively Robust and Forgery-Resistant Watermarking'.

Sept'25 I am a co-PI on a grant from the United Al-Saqer group to research privacy-preserving brain computer interfaces, with Abdulrahman Mahmoud and Elizabeth Churchill.

Sept'25 🔥 One paper on mask image watermarking accepted at NeurIPS’25.

Aug'25 I am a PI on a grant with Etihad Airways to research and develop conversational booking agents.

Aug'25 🔥 One paper on patching Speech Language Models accepted at EMNLP’25 (main).

May'25 🔥 Two papers accepted at ICML’25, one as a 🌟 Spotlight (top 2.6%).

May'25 I travelled to the US AI Forum by MBZUAI in San Francisco.

Dec'24 🥇First place in the NeurIPS'24 watermark removal challenge with 4.4k USD price money. Congrats to Fahad Shamsha and the team. (link)

Oct'24 🥇First place in GITEX Cybersecurity hackathon with 10.8k USD price money. Congrats to my MSc student Tameem Bakr and the team.

Aug'24 I joined MBZUAI as an Assistant Professor of Machine Learning.

Jun'24 🔥 Two papers accepted at USENIX’24 on Private Set Intersection& secure DNN inference.

Apr'24 🥇Received the Mathematics Doctoral Prize and the Waterloo Alumni Gold Medal.

Jan'24 🔥 Two papers accepted at ICLR’24 (Vienna) on adaptive image‑watermark attacks & universal backdoors.

Dec'23 Gave a research talk at Meta on privacy of personal information in fine‑tuned LLMs.

Oct'23 Talk at UCBerkeley & 🥇Best Poster Award at Cheriton Symposium (Waterloo).

Oct'23 🏆 Distinguished Contribution Award at Microsoft MLADS for our IEEE S&P’23 paper.

Jun'23 Research talks at Google & MongoDB; IEEE S&P’23 paper featured on the Microsoft Research Focus blog.

May'23 🔥 Paper on learnable watermarks for image generators accepted at USENIX’23 Security (Anaheim).

Apr'23 🔥 Paper on PII leakage in language models accepted at IEEE S&P’23 (San Francisco).

May'22 Started research internship at Microsoft Research with Shruti Tople & Lukas Wutschitz.

Feb'22 🏆 Awarded the David R. Cheriton Scholarship for outstanding academic achievements.