Ph.D. Candidate · Computer Science

Saleh Zare Zade

I study how large language models remember, forget, and fail. I build methods for safer, more private, and more trustworthy AI.

Detroit, USA salehz@wayne.edu

About

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Wayne State University, advised by Prof. Dongxiao Zhu.

My research focuses on large language model safety, privacy, and unlearning, with an emphasis on membership inference attacks, memorization behavior, and robust mitigation strategies for trustworthy AI systems.

Selected work

Recent publications

Research spanning machine unlearning, privacy attacks, and the security of language models.

  1. 01

    Attention Smoothing Is All You Need For Unlearning

    Zare Zade, S., Zhou, X., Liu, S., Zhu, D.

    ICLR · 2026
  2. 02

    Automatic Calibration for Membership Inference Attack on Large Language Models

    Zare Zade, S., Qiang, Y., Zhou, X., et al.

    ECAI · 2025
  3. 03

    Not All Tokens Are Meant to Be Forgotten

    Zhou, X., Qiang, Y., Zare Zade, S., et al.

    AAAI · 2026

View all publications

Recognition

Awards & service

Academic recognition and contribution to the research community.

Best Graduate Research Assistant

Wayne State University, 2025

Undergraduate distinction

Ranked #4 with direct entry to the Master’s program.

Academic service

Reviewer for ICML 2026 (Gold Reviewer), NeurIPS 2026, ICMLA 2026, AAAI 2027, and ICLR 2027.

Contact

Interested in trustworthy language models? Let’s talk.