I am a PhD student majoring in computer science at the School of Computing, National University of Singapore. I am fortunate to be advised by Reza Shokri. My research interests lie in in Data Protection and Privacy in Machine Learning. Currently I am a research intern at Apple ML Research. Here is my CV (until Feb 24, 2025).

I’m a recipient of the 2024 Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD fellowship and the 2023-2024 Google PhD Fellowship in security and privacy. Previously, I had a wonderful time interning at Apple ML Research in 2024 Spring and Azure Research - Microsoft Research in 2023 summer. I received my B.S. degree in computational mathematics at University of Science and Technology of China, where I had a memorable time.

Publications and Preprints

(* denotes equal contribution)

• Instance-Optimality for Private KL Distribution Estimation [Paper]
  Jiayuan Ye, Vitaly Feldman, Kunal Talwar
  In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2025
  (Accepted as spotlight, among ~3% of submissions)
  Also Presented at the Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP) 2025
  

• How much of my dataset did you use? Quantitative Data Usage Inference in Machine Learning [Paper]
  Yao Tong*, Jiayuan Ye*, Sajjad Zarifzadeh, Reza Shokri
  In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2025
  (Acccepted as oral, among ~2% of submissions)
  
  

• Leave-one-out Distinguishability in Machine Learning [Paper] [Code]
  Jiayuan Ye, Anastasia Borovykh, Soufiane Hayou, Reza Shokri
  In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2024
  Also Presented at the Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) 2024
  
  

• Initialization Matters: Privacy-Utility Analysis of Overparameterized Neural Networks [Paper] [Poster]
  Jiayuan Ye, Zhenyu Zhu, Fanghui Liu, Reza Shokri, Volkan Cevher
  In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023
  Also Presented at the Theory and Practice of Differential Privacy (TPDP) 2023
  

• Unified Enhancement of Privacy Bounds for Mixture Mechanisms via f-Differential Privacy [Paper]
  Chendi Wang*, Buxin Su*, Jiayuan Ye, Reza Shokri, Weijie J Su
  In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023
  

• Share Your Representation Only: Guaranteed Improvement of the Privacy-Utility Tradeoff in Federated Learning [Paper] [Code]
  Zebang Shen, Jiayuan Ye, Anmin Kang, Hamed Hassani, Reza Shokri
  In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2023
  
  

• Differentially Private Learning Needs Hidden State (Or Much Faster Convergence) [Paper] [Poster] [Talk]
  Jiayuan Ye, Reza Shokri
  In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022
  Also Presented at the Symposium on Foundations of Responsible Computing (FORC) 2022
  

• Enhanced Membership Inference Attacks against Machine Learning Models [Paper] [Slides] [Code]
  Jiayuan Ye, Aadyaa Maddi, Sasi Kumar Murakonda, Vincent Bindschaedler, Reza Shokri
  In the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) 2022
  
  

• Differential Privacy Dynamics of Langevin Diffusion and Noisy Gradient Descent [Paper] [Talk] [Slides] [Poster]
  Rishav Chourasia*, Jiayuan Ye*, Reza Shokri
  In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2021
  (Accepted as spotlight, among ~3% of submissions)
  

Professional Experiences

• Conference & Workshop Program Commitee/Reviewer: NeurIPS 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025; ICLR 2023, 2024, 2025, 2026; ICML 2023, 2024, 2025; AISTATS 2023, 2025; ACM CCS 2024; IEEE SaTML 2025; TPDP 2025; PPAI-2022; FL-ICML 2023; PRIVATE ML @ ICLR 2024; SYNTHDATA @ ICLR 2025; DATA-FM @ ICLR 2025.
• Journal Reviewer: JMLR (2022), SICOMP (2023)
• Conference & Workshop sub-reviewer: IEEE S&P 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024; PPAI 2021; ACM CCS 2021, 2022, 2023