Adel Bibi

Senior Researcher in Machine Learning and R&D Distinguished Advisor

Biography

Adel Bibi is a senior researcher in machine learning and computer vision at the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford, a Research Fellow (JRF) at Kellogg College, and a member of the ELLIS Society. Bibi is an R&D Distinguished Advisor with Softserve. Previously, Bibi was a senior research associate and a postdoctoral researcher with Philip H.S. Torr since October 2020. He received his MSc and PhD degrees from King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) in 2016 and 2020, respectively, advised by Bernard Ghanem. Bibi was awarded an Amazon Research Award in 2022 in the Machine Learning Algorithms and Theory track, the Google Gemma 2 Academic Award in 2024, and the Systemic AI Safety grant of ~$250,000 by the UK AI Security Institute in 2025. Bibi received four best paper awards; a NeurIPS23 workshop, an ICML23 workshop, a 2022 CVPR workshop, and one at the Optimization and Big Data Conference in 2018. His contributions include over 30 papers published in top machine learning and computer vision conferences. He also received four outstanding reviewer awards (CVPR18, CVPR19, ICCV19, ICLR22) and a Notable Area Chair Award in NeurIPS23.

Currently, Bibi is leading a group in Oxford focusing on the intersection between AI safety of large foundational models in both vision and language (covering topics such as robustness, certification, alignment, adversarial elicitation, etc.) and the efficient continual update of these models.

Download my resume

[Note!] I am always looking for strong self-motivated PhD students. If you are interested in AI Safety, Trustworthy, and Security of AI models and Agentic AI, reach out!

[Consulting Expertise] I have consulted in the past on projects spanning core machine learning and data science, computer vision, certification and AI safety, optimization formulations for matching and resource allocation problems, among other areas.

Interests

Trustworthy AI and Safety
Robustness and Certification
Continual Learning
Optimization

Education

PhD in Electrical Engineering (4.0/4.0); Machine Learning and Optimization Track, 2020

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
MSc in Electrical Engineering (4.0/4.0); Computer Vision Track, 2016

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)
BSc in Electrical Engineering (3.99/4.0), 2014

Kuwait University

News

[June 10th, 2025]: Our recent work on hijacking AI agents and creating an AI worm was featured on YouTube by Sabine Hossenfelder, a channel with over 1.7 million subscribers. More importantly, one that I watch frequently.
[May 1st, 2025]: One paper accepted to ICML 2025.
[April 3rd, 2025]: I was awarded the Systemic AI Safety grant (~$250,000) by the UK AI Security Institute. This was awarded to 20 applicants of a 451 (~4% acceptance rate).
[February 11th, 2025]: Four papers accepted to ICLR 2025; one paper of which as spotlight.
[September 25th, 2024]: Five papers accepted to NeurIPS 2024.
[September 20th, 2024]: I received the Google Gemma 2 Academic Program GCP Credit Award ($10,000).
[August 18th, 2024]: I joined Softserve as an R&D Distinguished Advisor.
[July 8th, 2024]: One paper accepted to MICCAI 2024.
[June 3rd, 2024]: One paper accepted to ECCV 2024.
[June 3rd, 2024]: Four papers accepted to ICML 2024. Special congrats to all students' lead authors. One accepted as Oral.
[May 28th, 2024]: Kumail Alhamoud is visiting me and Phil for 3 months this summer. Welcome, Kumail!
[May 23rd, 2024]: I am selected to serve as a Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS4.
[May 14th, 2024]: I was invited by the Rt Hon Deputy Prime Minister Oliver Dowden to be part of the official British Delegation (GREAT FUTURES) to Saudi Arabia on a trade expo towards improving collaborations on all fronts between the two nations.
[May 11th, 2024]: Media Coverage: Our recent paper on No “zero-shot” without exponential data has been covered and featured by Computerphile (~2.5 million subscribers) one youtube; see video here. Moreover, Sam Altman of OpenAI has also commented on reddit on our paper saying OpenAI is exploring similar directions. See details here.
[April 19th, 2024]: I was invited to give a number of talks in MBZUAI and the Oxford Robotics Institute.
[February 15th, 2024]: I gave a talk to TAHAKOM on AI Safety Research.
[February 13th, 2024]: I gave a talk at the AI Safety meeting in the Said Busienss School in Oxford in our work on AI Safety.
[February 7th, 2024]: Our paper SynthCLIP: Are We Ready for a Fully Synthetic CLIP Training? on training CLIP with only synthetic data was advertised on TLDR News which has over 1M subscribers.
[January 21th, 2024]: Three papers accepted to ICLR24 (one as spotlight).

~~ End of 2023 ~~

[December 16th, 2023]: Our paper When Do Prompting and Prefix-Tuing Work? A Theory of Capabilities and imitations received the Entropic Paper Award at the NeurIPS 2023 Workshop: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better (ICBINB): Failure Modes in the Age of Foundation Models.
[December 12th, 2023]: Received a Notable Area Chair Award in NeurIPS23 (awarded to 8.1% of 1223).
[December 9th, 2023]: One paper (SimCS: Simulation for Domain Incremental Online Continual Segmentation) accepted to AAAI24.
[November 2nd, 2023]: I gave two talks on trustwrothy AI to Kuwait University and Intematix, a startup based in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia.
[September 21st, 2023]: One paper on Language Model Tokenizers Introduce Unfairness Between Languages has been accepted to NeurIPS23.
[September 5th, 2023]: Invited by Dima Damen to give a talk at Bristol University.
[July 18th, 2023]: One robustness paper is accepted to TMLR.
[July 11th, 2023]: Our paper on Provably Correct Physics-Informed Neural Networks received the outstanding paper award in the Formal Verification Workshop in ICML23.
[July 14th, 2023]: One paper on online continual learning is accepted to ICCV 2023.
[July 11th, 2023]: Our paper Provably Correct Physics-Informed Neural Networks received an outstanding paper award at WFVML ICML23 workshop.
[June 23rd, 2023]: One paper accepted to DeployableGenerativeAI (ICML23 Workshop).
[June 20th, 2023]: Three papers accepted to AdvML-Frontiers (ICML23 Workshop).
[June 18th, 2023]: Invited to give a talk at the CLVision workshop in CVPR23. I was also part of the panel discussion.
[April 24th, 2023]: One paper accepted to ICML 2023.
[March 29th, 2023]: Four papers accepted to CLVision (CVPR23 Workshop).
[March 9th, 2023]: Media coverage by DOU, a Ukrainian development community focused on technologies, frameworks, and code, for my work with Taras Rumezhak.
[March 1st, 2023]: I am promoted to a Senior Researcher (G9) in Machine Learning and Computer Vision at Oxford.
[February 28th, 2023]: I will serve as an Area Chair for the NeurIPS 2023.
[February 27th, 2023]: Two papers accepted to CVPR 2023. One of the two papers is accepted as a highlight (2.5% of ~9K submissions).
[January 23th, 2023]: I will serve as an Area Chair for the ICLR 2023 Workshop on Trustworthy ML.

~~ End of 2022 ~~

[December 9th, 2022]: I will serve as a Senior Program Committee (Area Chair/Meta Reviewer) for IJCAI 2023.
[November 3rd, 2022]: Joined the ELLIS Society as a member.
[October 11th, 2022]: One paper accepted to WACV23.
[October 10th, 2022]: Recieved an Amazon Research Award.
[September 14th, 2022]: Our paper N-FGSM accepted to NeurIPS22.
[August 28th, 2022]: Our paper ANCER was accepted in Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR).
[August 15th, 2022]: Our paper on Tropical Geometry was accepted to appear in the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI).
[July 11th, 2022]: I will serve as a Senior Program Committee (Area Chair/Meta Reviewer) for AAAI23.
[May 26th, 2022]: Three papers accepted to the Adversarial Machine Learning Frontiers ICML2022 workshop! Papers will be coming on arXiv soon.
[May 16th, 2022]: Our paper titled Data Dependent Randomzied Smoothing is accepted to UAI22.
[April 22nd, 2022]: I was selected as the Highlighted Reviewer of ICLR 2022 and received a free conference registration.

~~ End of 2021 ~~

[Dec 1st, 2021]: I got promoted to a Senior Research Associate (G8) in machine learning of the Torr Vision Group (TVG) at the University of Oxford.
[Dec 1st, 2021]: Two papers, Combating Adversaries with anti-adversaries and DeformRS: Certifying Input Deformations with Randomized Smoothing, are accepted in AAAI22.
[Nov 18th, 2021]: We were awarded KAUST’s Competitive Research Grant with a total of > 1.05M$ (one million USD). This is a 3 years collaboration between KAUST and Oxford.
[Oct 15th, 2021]: Rethinking Clustering for Robustness is accepted in BMVC21.
[June 22nd, 2021]: Anti Adversary paper is accepted in Adversarial Machine Learning Workshop @ICML21.
[June 13th, 2021]: I have been elected as a Junior Research Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. Appointment starts in October 2021.
[March 28th, 2021]: ETB robustness paper is accepted in RobustML Workshop @ICLR21.

~~ End of 2020 ~~

[November 8th, 2020]: New paper on robustness is on arXiv.
[November 8th, 2020]: New paper on randomized smoothing is on arXiv.
[October 15th, 2020]: I joined the Torr Vision Group working with Philip Torr at the University of Oxford.
[July 2nd, 2020]: Gabor layers enhance robustness paper accepted to ECCV20 arXiv.
[June 30th, 2020]: One paper is out on new expressions for the output moments of ReLU based networks with various new appliactions arXiv.
[June 24th, 2020]: New paper with SOTA results, backed with theory, on training robust models through feature clustering arXiv.
[March 31st, 2020]: I have sucessfully defended my PhD thesis.

~~ End of 2019 ~~

[Dec 20th, 2019]: One paper accepted to ICLR20.
[Nov 11th, 2019]: One spotlight paper accepted to AAAI20.
[Sept 25th, 2019]: Recognized as outstanding reviewer for ICCV19. Link.
[August 5th, 2019]: I was invited to give a talk about the most recent research in computer vision and machine learning from the IVUL group at PRIS19, Dead Sea, Jordan. I also gave a 1 hour long workshop about deep learning and pytorch. Slides1/Slides2/Material.
[July 6th, 2019]: I was invited to give a talk at the Eastern European Conference on Computer Vision, Odessa, Ukraine. Slides.
[June 28th, 2019]: I gave a talk at the Biomedical Computer Vision Group directed by Prof Pablo Arbelaez, Bogota, Colombia. Slides.
[June 15th, 2019]: Attended CVPR19.
[June 9th, 2019]: Recognized as an outstanding reviewer for CVPR19. This is the second time in a row for CVPR. Check it out. :)
[May 26th, 2019]: A new paper is out on derivative free optimization with momentum with new rates and results on continuous controls tasks. arXiv.
[May 25th, 2019]: New paper! New provably tight interval bounds are derived for DNNs. This allows for very simple robust training of large DNNs. arXiv.
[May 11th, 2019]: How to train robust networks outperforming 2-21x fold data augmentation? New paper out on arXiv.
[May 6th, 2019]: Attended ICLR19 in New Orleans.
[Feb 4th, 2019]: New paper on derivative-free optimization with importance sampling is out! Paper is on arXiv.

~~ End of 2018 ~~

[Dec 22nd, 2018]: One paper accepted to ICLR19, Louisiana, USA.
[Nov 6th, 2018]: One paper accepted to WACV19, Hawaii, USA.
[July 3rd, 2018]: One paper accepted to ECCV18, Munich, Germany.
[June 19th, 2018]: Attended CVPR18 and gave an oral talk on our most recent work on analyzing piecewise linear deep networks using Gaussian network moments. Tensorflow, Pytorch and MATLAB codes are released.
[June 17th, 2018]: Received a fully funded scholarship to attend the AI-DLDA 18 summer school in Udine, Italy. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend for time constraints. Link
[June 15th, 2018]: New paper out! “Improving SAGA via a Probabilistic Interpolation with Gradient Descent”.
[April 30th, 2018]: I’m interning for 6 months at the Intel Labs in Munich this summer with Vladlen Koltun.
[April 22nd, 2018]: Recognized as an outstanding reviewer for CVPR18. I’m also on the list of emergency reviewers. Check it out. :)
[March 6th, 2018]: One paper accepted as [Oral] in CVPR 2018.
[Feb 5, 2018]: Awarded the best KAUST poster prize in the Optimization and Big Data Conference.

~~ End of 2017 ~~

[Decemmber 11, 2017]: TCSC code is on github.
[October 22, 2017]: Attened ICCV17, Venice, Italy.
[July 22, 2017]: Attened CVPR17 in Hawaii and gave an oral presentation on our work on solving the LASSO with FFTs, July 2017.
[July 16, 2017]: FFTLasso’s code is available online.
[July 9, 2017]: Attended the ICVSS17, Sicily, Italy.
[June 15, 2017]: Selected to attend the International Computer Vision Summer School (ICVSS17), Sicily, Italy.
[March 17, 2017]: 1 paper accepted to ICCV17.
[March 14, 2017]: Received my NanoDegree on Deep Learning from Udacity.
[March 3, 2017]: 1 oral paper accepted to CVPR17, Hawai, USA.

~~ End of 2016 ~~

[October 19, 2016]: ECCV16’s code has been released on github.
[October 8, 2016]: Attended ECCV16, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
[July 11, 2016]: 1 spotlight paper accepted to ECCV16, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
[June 26, 2016]: Attended CVPR16, Las Vegas, USA. Two papers presented.
[May 13, 2016]: ICCVW15 code is now avaliable online.
[April 11, 2016]: Successfully defended my Master’s Thesis.
[March 2, 2016]: 2 papers (1 spotlight) accepted to CVPR16, Las Vegas, USA.

~~ End of 2015 ~~

[November 20, 2015]: 1 paper acceted to ICCVW15, Santiago, Chile.
[June 8, 2015]: Attended CVPR15, Boston, USA.

Awards and Recognition

Systemic AI Safety Award

I received the Systemic AI Safety Grant (~$250,000) for our work on Safe OS Agents

Adel Bibi

Last updated on May 22, 2025 1 min read

Google Gemma 2 Academic Award 2024

I received the Google Gemma 2 Academic Program GCP Credit Award ($10,000) for my project on certifying the output of Large Language Models.

Adel Bibi

Last updated on Nov 19, 2024 1 min read

Outstanding Paper Award; Entropic Paper Award in NeurIPS23 workshop

The award is presented to our paper “Paper: When Do Prompting and Prefix-Tuning Work? A Theory of Capabilities and Limitations” in the NeurIPS23 Workshop I Cant Believe Its Not Better (ICBINB): Failure Modes in the Age of Foundation Models.

Adel Bibi

Last updated on Jan 21, 2024 1 min read

Outstanding Paper Award; Entropic Paper Award in NeurIPS23 workshop

Notable Area Chair Award in NeurIPS23

Unfortunately, I did not attend NeurIPS 23 this year as I was ill (luckily, my student Aleksandar Petrov was there to present our paper). However, to my surprise, he sent me this image where I was selected as a notable Area Chair.

Adel Bibi

Last updated on Jan 21, 2024 1 min read

Outstanding Paper Award in ICML23 Workshop

The award is presented to our paper “Provably Correct Physics-Informed Neural Networks” in the Workshop on Formal Verification of Machine Learning (WFVML 2023) in ICML23. Congrats to the my student Francisco Eiras.

Adel Bibi

Last updated on Jan 21, 2024 1 min read

Outstanding Paper Award in ICML23 Workshop

See all posts

Featured Publications

Minseon Kim, Jin Myung Kwak, Lama Alssum, Bernard Ghanem, Philip Torr, David Krueger, Fazl Barez, Adel Bibi

July, 2025 Conference on Laguage Modeling (COLM25)

Rethinking Safety in LLM Fine-tuning: An Optimization Perspective

Fine-tuning language models is commonly believed to inevitably harm their safety, even when using harmless datasets, requiring additional safety measures. We challenge this belief through systematic testing, showing that poor optimization choices—not inherent trade-offs—often cause safety problems measured as harmful responses to adversarial prompts. By properly selecting key training hyper parameters—learning rate, batch size, and gradient steps—we reduce unsafe model responses from 16% to approximately 5% as measured by keyword matching and GPT-4 evaluation while maintaining utility performance. Based on this observation, we propose a simple exponential moving average (EMA) momentum technique in parameter space, that can preserve safety by creating a stable optimization path that retains the original model’s safety properties. Our experiments on Llama families across multiple datasets (Dolly, Alpaca, ORCA) demonstrate that safety problems during fine-tuning can be largely avoided without specialized interventions, outperforming existing approaches that require additional safety data while offering practical guidelines for maintaining both model performance and safety during adaptation.

Xingyi Yang, Constantin Venhoff, Ashkan Khakzar, Christian Schroeder de Witt, Puneet K Dokania, Adel Bibi, Philip Torr

May, 2025 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML25)

Mixture of Experts Made Intrinsically Interpretable

Neurons in large language models often exhibit polysemanticity, simultaneously encoding multiple unrelated concepts and obscuring interpretability. Instead of relying on post-hoc methods, we present MoE-X, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model designed to be intrinsically interpretable. Our approach is motivated by the observation that, in language models, wider networks with sparse activations are more likely to capture interpretable factors. However, directly training such large sparse networks is computationally prohibitive. MoE architectures offer a scalable alternative by activating only a subset of experts for any given input, inherently aligning with interpretability objectives. In MoE-X, we establish this connection by rewriting the MoE layer as an equivalent sparse, large MLP. This approach enables efficient scaling of the hidden size while maintaining sparsity. To further enhance interpretability, we enforce sparse activation within each expert and redesign the routing mechanism to prioritize experts with the highest activation sparsity. These designs ensure that only the most salient features are routed and processed by the experts. We evaluate MoE-X on chess and natural language tasks, showing that it achieves performance comparable to dense models while significantly improving interpretability. MoE-X achieves a perplexity better than GPT-2, with interpretability surpassing even sparse autoencoder (SAE)-based approaches.

Wenxuan Zhang, Philip H.S. Torr, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Adel Bibi

April, 2025 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR25) [Spotlight]

Bi-Factorial Preference Optimization: Balancing Safety-Helpfulness in Language Models

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on human preferences, typically through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has proven successful in enhancing their capabilities. However, ensuring the safety of LLMs during the fine-tuning remains a critical concern, and mitigating the potential conflicts in safety and helpfulness is costly in RLHF. To address this issue, we propose a supervised learning framework called Bi-Factorial Preference Optimization (BFPO), which re-parameterizes a joint RLHF objective of both safety and helpfulness into a single supervised learning objective. In the supervised optimization, a labeling function is used to capture global preferences ranking to balance both safety and helpfulness. To evaluate BFPO, we develop a benchmark including comprehensive discriminative and generative tasks for helpfulness and harmlessness. The results indicate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in both safety and helpfulness. Moreover, BFPO eliminates the need for human prompting and annotation in LLM fine-tuning while achieving the same level of safety as methods that heavily rely on human labor, with less than 10% of the computational resources. The training recipes and models will be released.

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