Alex Gittens

Computer Science Department at RPI.

prof_pic.jpg

Lally Management Building, Office 316

110 8th St

Troy, NY 12180

I am an associate professor of computer science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My research focuses on designing algorithms with provable performance guarantees, with an emphasis on tensor factorization, trustworthy machine learning, and randomized numerical linear algebra for large-scale machine learning applications.

I have advanced scalable methods for tensor decomposition, developed robust techniques for scalable and fair machine learning, and explored randomized algorithms to optimize computational and communication efficiency in data-intensive and distributed problems. My work has been published in top-tier venues and applied across domains, from scientific computing to real-world machine learning systems.

Before joining RPI, I earned my PhD in applied and computational mathematics from CalTech and held research positions at eBay, the International Computer Science Institute, and UC Berkeley’s AMPLab.

selected publications

  1. Patching LLMs Like Software: A Lightweight Method for Improving Safety Policies in Large Language Models
    Huzaifa Arif, Keerthiram Murugesan, Ching-Yun Ko, and 3 more authors
    Workshop paper ICLR 2026 Trustworthy AI, 2025
    arXiv:2511.08484
  2. Exploiting Missing Data Remediation Strategies Using Adversarial Missingness Attacks
    Deniz Koyuncu, Alex Gittens, Bülent Yener, and 1 more author
    In Fortieth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2026
  3. Group Fair Federated Learning via Stochastic Kernel Regularization
    Huzaifa Arif, Pin-Yu Chen, Keerthiram Murugesan, and 1 more author
    Transactions on Machine Learning Research, 2025
  4. PEEL the Layers and Find Yourself: Revisiting Inference-Time Data Leakage for Residual Neural Networks
    Huzaifa Arif, Keerthiram Murugesan, Payel Das, and 2 more authors
    In 2025 IEEE Conference on Secure and Trustworthy Machine Learning (SaTML), 2025
  5. Aligners: Decoupling LLMs and Alignment
    Lilian Ngweta, Mayank Agarwal, Subha Maity, and 3 more authors
    In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, Nov 2024
  6. Simple Disentanglement of Style and Content in Visual Representations
    Lilian Ngweta, Subha Maity, Alex Gittens, and 2 more authors
    In International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2023, Nov 2023
  7. Deception by Omission: Using Adversarial Missingness to Poison Causal Structure Learning
    Deniz Koyuncu, Alex Gittens, Bülent Yener, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 29th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2023, Nov 2023
  8. Adaptive Sketching for Fast and Convergent Canonical Polyadic Decomposition
    Alex Gittens, Kareem S. Aggour, and Bülent Yener
    In Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2020, Nov 2020
  9. NoisyCUR: An Algorithm for Two-Cost Budgeted Matrix Completion
    Dong Hu, Alex Gittens, and Malik Magdon-Ismail
    In Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases - European Conference, ECML PKDD 2020, Nov 2020