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Tejas Kulkarni

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Published work

7 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Membership Inference Attacks for Retrieval Based In-Context Learning for Document Question Answering

We show that remotely hosted applications employing in-context learning when augmented with a retrieval function to select in-context examples can be vulnerable to membership-inference attacks even when the service provider and users are separate parties. We propose two black-box membership inference attacks that exploit query text prefixes to distinguish member from non-member inputs. The first attack uses a reference model to estimate an otherwise unavailable loss metric. The second attack improves upon it by eliminating the reference model and instead computing a membership statistic through a simple but novel weighted-averaging scheme. Our comprehensive empirical evaluations consider a stricter case in which the adversary has a paraphrased version of the text in the queries and show that our attacks can exhibit stronger resilience to paraphrasing and outperform three prior attacks in many cases with small number of prefixes. We also adapt an existing ensemble prompting defense to our setting, demonstrating that it substantially mitigates the privacy leakage caused by our second attack.

preprint2021arXiv

Direct Numerical Simulations of the Swirling von Karman Flow Using a Semi-implicit Moving Immersed Boundary Method

We present a novel moving immersed boundary method (IBM) and employ it in direct numerical simulations (DNS) of the closed-vessel swirling von Karman flow in laminar and turbulent regimes. The IBM extends direct-forcing approaches by leveraging a time integration scheme, that embeds the immersed boundary forcing step within a semi-implicit iterative Crank-Nicolson scheme. The overall method is robust, stable, and yields excellent results in canonical cases with static and moving boundaries. The moving IBM allows us to reproduce the geometry and parameters of the swirling von Karman flow experiments in (F. Ravelet, A. Chiffaudel, and F. Daviaud, JFM 601, 339 (2008)) on a Cartesian grid. In these DNS, the flow is driven by two-counter rotating impellers fitted with curved inertial stirrers. We analyze the transition from laminar to turbulent flow by increasing the rotation rate of the counter-rotating impellers to attain the four Reynolds numbers 90, 360, 2000, and 4000. In the laminar regime at Reynolds number 90 and 360, we observe flow features similar to those reported in the experiments and in particular, the appearance of a symmetry-breaking instability at Reynolds number 360. We observe transitional turbulence at Reynolds number 2000. Fully developed turbulence is achieved at Reynolds number 4000. Non-dimensional torque computed from simulations matches correlations from experimental data. The low Reynolds number symmetries, lost with increasing Reynolds number, are recovered in the mean flow in the fully developed turbulent regime, where we observe two tori symmetrical about the mid-height plane. We note that turbulent fluctuations in the central region of the device remain anisotropic even at the highest Reynolds number 4000, suggesting that isotropization requires significantly higher Reynolds numbers.

preprint2020arXiv

Demonstrating high-precision photometry with a CubeSat: ASTERIA observations of 55 Cancri e

ASTERIA (Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research In Astrophysics) is a 6U CubeSat space telescope (10 cm x 20 cm x 30 cm, 10 kg). ASTERIA's primary mission objective was demonstrating two key technologies for reducing systematic noise in photometric observations: high-precision pointing control and high-stabilty thermal control. ASTERIA demonstrated 0.5 arcsecond RMS pointing stability and $\pm$10 milliKelvin thermal control of its camera payload during its primary mission, a significant improvement in pointing and thermal performance compared to other spacecraft in ASTERIA's size and mass class. ASTERIA launched in August 2017 and deployed from the International Space Station (ISS) November 2017. During the prime mission (November 2017 -- February 2018) and the first extended mission that followed (March 2018 - May 2018), ASTERIA conducted opportunistic science observations which included collection of photometric data on 55 Cancri, a nearby exoplanetary system with a super-Earth transiting planet. The 55 Cancri data were reduced using a custom pipeline to correct CMOS detector column-dependent gain variations. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) approach was used to simultaneously detrend the photometry using a simple baseline model and fit a transit model. ASTERIA made a marginal detection of the known transiting exoplanet 55 Cancri e ($\sim2$~\Rearth), measuring a transit depth of $374\pm170$ ppm. This is the first detection of an exoplanet transit by a CubeSat. The successful detection of super-Earth 55 Cancri e demonstrates that small, inexpensive spacecraft can deliver high-precision photometric measurements.

preprint2020arXiv

Private Protocols for U-Statistics in the Local Model and Beyond

In this paper, we study the problem of computing $U$-statistics of degree $2$, i.e., quantities that come in the form of averages over pairs of data points, in the local model of differential privacy (LDP). The class of $U$-statistics covers many statistical estimates of interest, including Gini mean difference, Kendall's tau coefficient and Area under the ROC Curve (AUC), as well as empirical risk measures for machine learning problems such as ranking, clustering and metric learning. We first introduce an LDP protocol based on quantizing the data into bins and applying randomized response, which guarantees an $ε$-LDP estimate with a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of $O(1/\sqrt{n}ε)$ under regularity assumptions on the $U$-statistic or the data distribution. We then propose a specialized protocol for AUC based on a novel use of hierarchical histograms that achieves MSE of $O(α^3/nε^2)$ for arbitrary data distribution. We also show that 2-party secure computation allows to design a protocol with MSE of $O(1/nε^2)$, without any assumption on the kernel function or data distribution and with total communication linear in the number of users $n$. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our protocols through experiments on synthetic and real datasets.

preprint2016arXiv

Understanding Visual Concepts with Continuation Learning

We introduce a neural network architecture and a learning algorithm to produce factorized symbolic representations. We propose to learn these concepts by observing consecutive frames, letting all the components of the hidden representation except a small discrete set (gating units) be predicted from the previous frame, and let the factors of variation in the next frame be represented entirely by these discrete gated units (corresponding to symbolic representations). We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on datasets of faces undergoing 3D transformations and Atari 2600 games.

preprint2015arXiv

Language Understanding for Text-based Games Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we consider the task of learning control policies for text-based games. In these games, all interactions in the virtual world are through text and the underlying state is not observed. The resulting language barrier makes such environments challenging for automatic game players. We employ a deep reinforcement learning framework to jointly learn state representations and action policies using game rewards as feedback. This framework enables us to map text descriptions into vector representations that capture the semantics of the game states. We evaluate our approach on two game worlds, comparing against baselines using bag-of-words and bag-of-bigrams for state representations. Our algorithm outperforms the baselines on both worlds demonstrating the importance of learning expressive representations.

preprint2013arXiv

Robust Leader Election in a Fast-Changing World

We consider the problem of electing a leader among nodes in a highly dynamic network where the adversary has unbounded capacity to insert and remove nodes (including the leader) from the network and change connectivity at will. We present a randomized Las Vegas algorithm that (re)elects a leader in O(D\log n) rounds with high probability, where D is a bound on the dynamic diameter of the network and n is the maximum number of nodes in the network at any point in time. We assume a model of broadcast-based communication where a node can send only 1 message of O(\log n) bits per round and is not aware of the receivers in advance. Thus, our results also apply to mobile wireless ad-hoc networks, improving over the optimal (for deterministic algorithms) O(Dn) solution presented at FOMC 2011. We show that our algorithm is optimal by proving that any randomized Las Vegas algorithm takes at least omega(D\log n) rounds to elect a leader with high probability, which shows that our algorithm yields the best possible (up to constants) termination time.