Aounon Kumar
Postdoctoral researcher
Harvard University
Aounon Kumar is a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University who studies the robustness, security, and reliability of machine learning models. With Himabindu Lakkaraju he led Manipulating Large Language Models to Increase Product Visibility, which showed how strategic text sequences can steer product recommendations.
Robustness Research at Maryland
Kumar's research includes defenses against adversarial prompts. Before Harvard he completed a PhD at the University of Maryland on certified robustness.
The Product Visibility Paper
The visibility paper, co-authored with Himabindu Lakkaraju and covered by The New York Times and other outlets, demonstrated that vendors could insert optimized strategic text sequences into product pages to raise recommendation rank. The code is public on GitHub.