Research Interests

Adversarial Machine Learning

Studying vulnerabilities in RLHF-aligned language models through backdoor attacks, subpopulation targeting, and representation-aware perturbations.

LLM Safety & Alignment (RLHF)

Designing and analyzing alignment pipelines (SFT, PPO, DPO) to improve safety, robustness, and reliability of large language models.

Mechanistic Interpretability of LLMs

Understanding internal representations and reasoning circuits in language models to explain failures, backdoors, and emergent behaviors.

Publications

Equity-Aware Geospatial AI for Forecasting Demand-Driven Hospital Locations in Germany
arXiv Pre-print | 2nd best project award at DS course at Saarland University2025

Equity-Aware Geospatial AI for Forecasting Demand-Driven Hospital Locations in Germany

Piyush Pant, M.W. Suntoro, A. Siddiqua, M.S. Sharif, D. Ahmed

PDF arXiv Code
GREAT: Generalizable Backdoor Attacks in RLHF via Emotion-Aware Trigger Synthesis
arXiv Pre-print | Under Review2025

GREAT: Generalizable Backdoor Attacks in RLHF via Emotion-Aware Trigger Synthesis

S.K. Dutta, Yuelin Xu, Piyush Pant, Xiao Zhang

PDF arXiv Code
Improving LLM Safety and Helpfulness using SFT and DPO: A Study on OPT-350M
arXiv Pre-print | Independent Research2025

Improving LLM Safety and Helpfulness using SFT and DPO: A Study on OPT-350M

Piyush Pant

PDF arXiv Code
Machine Learning Techniques for Analysis of Mars Weather Data
15th Intl. Conf. on Electronics, Computers and Artificial Intelligence (ECAI) | IEEE2023

Machine Learning Techniques for Analysis of Mars Weather Data

Piyush Pant, Anand Singh Rajawat, SB Goyal, Baharu Bin Kemat, Traian Candin Mihălţan, Chaman Verma, Maria Simona Răboacă

PDF
Deep Q-Learning for Virtual Autonomous Automobile
ICDAM-2023 | Springer2023

Deep Q-Learning for Virtual Autonomous Automobile

Piyush Pant, Rajendra Sinha, Anand Singh Rajawat, SB Goyal, Masri bin Abdul Lasi

PDF
Authentication and Authorization in Modern Web Apps for Data Security using Nodejs and Role of Dark Web
ICIDCA 2022 | Procedia Computer Science 215 (Pg 781–790) - Elsevier2022

Authentication and Authorization in Modern Web Apps for Data Security using Nodejs and Role of Dark Web

Piyush Pant, Anand Singh Rajawat, SB Goyal, Pradeep Bedi, Chaman Verma, Maria Simona Raboaca, Florentina Magda Enescu

PDF arXiv

Archives contain additional early-stage research and exploratory work conducted during my initial training phase. Some of my Early-stage research and undergraduate explorations are intentionally omitted from this view to ensure focus on my most robust, high-impact contributions to the field.

End of Peer-Reviewed Records