About
I am a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Chicago, mentored by Ben Zhao and Heather Zheng at the SAND Lab (Security, Algorithms, Networking and Data). My research interests are broadly at the intersection of ML, security and privacy, and cryptography. I am interested in studying the fundamentals of ML through attacks and defense, and investigating cryptographic solutions to security and privacy issues that are amplified by large models.Previously, I was an AI Resident at FAIR working on post-quantum cryptanalysis with ML, mentored by Kristin Lauter and François Charton. I graduated from UC Berkeley, where I did ML research at RISELab (Real-time Intelligent Secure Explainable systems Lab), mentored by Joseph Gonzalez.
Education
Ph.D. in Computer ScienceUniversity of Chicago (2023.9 - Present)
B.A. in Computer Science, Statistics, Applied Math, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, and Data Science
magna cum laude
University of California, Berkeley (2017.8 - 2020.12)
Publications
Understanding Implosion in Text-to-Image Generative ModelsWenxin Ding, Cathy Y. Li, Shawn Shan, Ben Y. Zhao, Haitao Zheng
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Oct 2024.
Inception Attacks: Immersive Hijacking in Virtual Reality
Zhuolin Yang, Cathy Y. Li, Arman Bhalla, Ben Y. Zhao, Haitao Zheng
In Submission.
PDF Press
SALSA Fresca: Angular Embeddings and Pre-Training for ML Attacks on LWE
Samuel Stevens, Emily Wenger, Cathy Li, Eshika Saxena, François Charton, Kristin Lauter
In Submission.
The Cool and the Cruel: Separating Hard Parts of LWE Secrets
Niklas Nolte*, Mohamed Malhou*, Emily Wenger*, Samuel Stevens, Cathy Y. Li, François Charton, Kristin Lauter
AFRICACRYPT, July 2024
PDF Code
An efficient algorithm for integer lattice reduction
François Charton, Kristin Lauter, Cathy Y. Li, Mark Tygert
SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications (SIMAX), 45 (1): 353-367, 2024.
PDF Code
SALSA Verde: a machine learning attack on Learning With Errors with sparse small secrets
Cathy Y. Li, Emily Wenger, Zeyuan Allen-Zhu, François Charton, Kristin Lauter
Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS), Nov 2023.
PDF Code
SALSA Picante: a machine learning attack on LWE with binary secrets
Cathy Y. Li, Jana Sotáková, Emily Wenger, Mohamed Malhou, Evrard Garcelon, François Charton, Kristin Lauter
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), Nov 2023.
PDF Code
Teaching
TA for CMSC 23400: Mobile Computing.UChicago, Winter 2024.
(Head) TA for CS 188: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. (800+ students)
UC Berkeley, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Summer 2020, Fall 2020.