AI Research

AI research

Papers and publications

Recent papers and long-form publications, newest first. Where a public arXiv version exists, it is linked directly.

The current thread running through the work is AI safety, agent security, model unlearning, LLM robustness, confidential systems, and infrastructure at cloud scale.

2026

2026 | arXiv:2602.11416

Optimizing Agent Planning for Security and Autonomy

Authors: Aashish Kolluri, Rishi Sharma, Manuel Costa, Boris Kopf, Tobias Niessen, Mark Russinovich, Shruti Tople, Santiago Zanella-Beguelin | Venue: arXiv preprint

This paper argues that deterministic, information-flow-based defenses for AI agents become much more practical once planning is optimized correctly. The work focuses on preserving strong security guarantees against indirect prompt injection without paying unnecessary costs in task completion or token usage.

2026 | arXiv:2602.06258

GRP-Obliteration: Unaligning LLMs With a Single Unlabeled Prompt

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Yanan Cai, Keegan Hines, Giorgio Severi, Blake Bullwinkel, Ahmed Salem | Venue: arXiv preprint

GRP-Obliteration studies how fragile safety alignment can be after deployment. It shows that a model can be substantially unaligned with a surprisingly small amount of unlabeled fine-tuning signal, which sharpens the case for stronger post-deployment defenses.

2026 | ICLR 2026 | arXiv:2407.10887

Hey, That’s My Model! Introducing Chain & Hash, an LLM Fingerprinting Technique

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem | Venue: ICLR 2026

Chain & Hash tackles the problem of model theft and misuse by proposing an LLM fingerprinting method with concrete properties such as persistence, robustness, and unforgeability. It is about proving lineage, not just detecting similar behavior.

2026 | Communications of the ACM

Redefining the Software Engineering Profession for AI

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Scott Hanselman | Venue: Communications of the ACM

An ACM article on how AI changes the core expectations of software engineering practice, mentorship, and technical judgment.

2025

2025 | Communications of the ACM 68 (8), 46-53

The Price of Intelligence

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem, Santiago Zanella-Beguelin, Yonatan Zunger | Venue: Communications of the ACM 68 (8), 46-53

This ACM article argues that LLM deployment comes with structural risks around memorization, manipulation, and control, and that those risks have to be treated as system properties rather than edge cases.

2025 | arXiv:2507.02956

A Representation Engineering Perspective on the Effectiveness of Multi-Turn Jailbreaks

Authors: Blake Bullwinkel, Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem, Santiago Zanella-Beguelin, Daniel Jones, Giorgio Severi, Eugenia Kim, Keegan Hines, Amanda Minnich, Yonatan Zunger, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar | Venue: arXiv preprint

This paper analyzes why multi-turn jailbreaks remain effective even against stronger aligned models. By looking at the attack through internal representation changes, it explains how conversational state can be gradually steered into unsafe regions.

2025 | arXiv:2506.10527

LogiPlan: A Structured Benchmark for Logical Planning and Relational Reasoning in LLMs

Authors: Yanan Cai, Ahmed Salem, Besmira Nushi, Mark Russinovich | Venue: arXiv preprint

LogiPlan introduces a benchmark for testing whether LLMs can reason over structured relationships and carry out planning across them. The emphasis is on the kinds of relational reasoning that matter for knowledge graphs, infrastructure, and business workflows.

2025 | arXiv:2506.09956

LLMail-Inject: A Dataset from a Realistic Adaptive Prompt Injection Challenge

Authors: Sahar Abdelnabi, Aideen Fay, Ahmed Salem, Egor Zverev, Kai-Chieh Liao, Chi-Huang Liu, Chun-Chih Kuo, Jannis Weigend, Danyael Manlangit, Alex Apostolov, Haris Umair, Joao Donato, Masayuki Kawakita, Athar Mahboob, Tran Huu Bach, Tsun-Han Chiang, Myeongjin Cho, Hajin Choi, Byeonghyeon Kim, Hyeonjin Lee, Benjamin Pannell, Conor McCauley, Mark Russinovich, Andrew Paverd, Giovanni Cherubin | Venue: arXiv preprint

LLMail-Inject captures prompt-injection attempts in a more realistic adversarial setting. The dataset is designed to help evaluate defenses against attacks that adapt over time instead of following a fixed benchmark script.

2025 | arXiv:2505.23643

Securing AI Agents with Information-Flow Control

Authors: Manuel Costa, Boris Kopf, Aashish Kolluri, Andrew Paverd, Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem, Shruti Tople, Lukas Wutschitz, Santiago Zanella-Beguelin | Venue: arXiv preprint

This work applies information-flow control to AI agents so that systems can reason formally about what an agent is allowed to read, trust, and act on. The goal is to block prompt injection and unsafe tool use with system-level guarantees instead of ad hoc heuristics.

2025 | arXiv:2503.05264

Jailbreaking is (Mostly) Simpler Than You Think

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem | Venue: arXiv preprint

This paper proposes the Context Compliance Attack, an optimization-free jailbreak that exploits how many AI systems use prior conversation context. It shows that some safety failures come less from exotic prompt engineering and more from structural weaknesses in conversation design.

2025 | arXiv:2502.15010

Obliviate: Efficient Unmemorization for Protecting Intellectual Property in Large Language Models

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem | Venue: arXiv preprint

Obliviate targets verbatim memorization in language models with a lightweight post-training approach. The paper focuses on reducing copyrighted text leakage while preserving model utility better than heavy-handed unlearning or shallow output filtering.

2025 | arXiv:2501.07238

Lessons From Red Teaming 100 Generative AI Products

Authors: Blake Bullwinkel, Amanda Minnich, Shiven Chawla, Gary Lopez, Martin Pouliot, Whitney Maxwell, Joris de Gruyter, Katherine Pratt, Saphir Qi, Nina Chikanov, Roman Lutz, Raja Sekhar Rao Dheekonda, Bolor-Erdene Jagdagdorj, Eugenia Kim, Justin Song, Keegan Hines, Daniel Jones, Giorgio Severi, Richard Lundeen, Sam Vaughan, Victoria Westerhoff, Pete Bryan, Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, Yonatan Zunger, Chang Kawaguchi, Mark Russinovich, et al. | Venue: arXiv preprint

This paper distills what Microsoft learned from red teaming more than 100 generative AI products. It proposes a threat-modeling vocabulary and a set of practical lessons for running safety and security assessments at scale.

2025 | USENIX Security 2025 | arXiv:2404.01833

Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem, Ronen Eldan | Venue: 34th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 25)

Crescendo shows how a harmless-looking multi-turn conversation can gradually walk an aligned model into unsafe output. The work became one of the clearest demonstrations that jailbreak risk cannot be evaluated only on single-prompt attacks.

2024

2024 | Queue 22 (6), 38-61

The Price of Intelligence: Three Risks Inherent in LLMs

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Ahmed Salem, Santiago Zanella-Beguelin, Yonatan Zunger | Venue: Queue 22 (6), 38-61

A Queue article distilling three persistent risks in LLM systems: memorization, manipulation, and the difficulty of auditing behavior once models are deployed at scale.

2024 | Queue 22 (4), 73-100

Confidential Computing Proofs

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Cédric Fournet, Greg Zaverucha, Josh Benaloh, Ben Murdoch, Manuel Costa | Venue: Queue 22 (4), 73-100

This article explains how confidential-computing systems can produce proofs about code and execution, so attestation says something meaningful about what is running and why it should be trusted.

2023

2023 | Communications of the ACM 67 (1), 68-76

Why Should I Trust Your Code?

Authors: Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, Cédric Fournet, Kapil Vaswani, Sylvan Clebsch, Moritz Riechert, Mark Russinovich, et al. | Venue: Communications of the ACM 67 (1), 68-76

This article explains why trusted execution environments still need transparent build and deployment evidence before users can believe the code inside them is actually trustworthy.

2023 | Communications of the ACM 67 (1), 52-53

Confidential Computing: Elevating Cloud Security and Privacy

Author: Mark Russinovich | Venue: Communications of the ACM 67 (1), 52-53

A concise ACM overview of why confidential computing matters for cloud platforms that need to protect sensitive data while it is actively being processed.

2023 | Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 17 | arXiv:2310.11559

Confidential Consortium Framework: Secure Multiparty Applications with Confidentiality, Integrity, and High Availability

Authors: Heidi Howard, Fritz Alder, Edward Ashton, Amaury Chamayou, Sylvan Clebsch, Manuel Costa, Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, Cédric Fournet, Andrew Jeffery, Matthew Kerner, Fotios Kounelis, Markus A. Kuppe, Julien Maffre, Mark Russinovich, Christoph M. Wintersteiger | Venue: Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment, Volume 17

This paper presents the Confidential Consortium Framework as a foundation for secure multiparty applications that need confidentiality, integrity, and availability together. It connects confidential computing ideas to practical, high-availability distributed systems.

2023 | arXiv:2310.02238

Who’s Harry Potter? Approximate Unlearning in LLMs

Authors: Ronen Eldan, Mark Russinovich | Venue: arXiv preprint

This paper explores whether a model can forget a subset of its training data without full retraining. It became an early and influential example of targeted unlearning for copyrighted content inside large language models.

2023 | Queue 21 (4), 94-122

Why Should I Trust Your Code? Confidential Computing Enables Users to Authenticate Code Running in TEEs, but Users Also Need Evidence This Code Is Trustworthy.

Authors: Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, Cédric Fournet, Kapil Vaswani, Sylvan Clebsch, Moritz Riechert, Mark Russinovich, et al. | Venue: Queue 21 (4), 94-122

An expanded Queue treatment of the same software-trust problem, with more detail on attestation, supply chains, and what trustworthy deployment evidence should look like.

2023 | Queue 21 (4), 44-48

Confidential Computing: Elevating Cloud Security and Privacy: Working toward a More Secure and Innovative Future

Author: Mark Russinovich | Venue: Queue 21 (4), 44-48

A Queue essay on how confidential computing extends cloud security guarantees from data at rest and in transit to data while it is in active use.

2022

2022 | arXiv:2202.07848

Singularity: Planet-Scale, Preemptive and Elastic Scheduling of AI Workloads

Authors: Dharma Shukla, Muthian Sivathanu, Srinidhi Viswanatha, Bhargav Gulavani, Rimma Nehme, Amey Agrawal, Chen Chen, Nipun Kwatra, Mark Russinovich, et al. | Venue: arXiv preprint

Singularity describes Microsoft’s global scheduler for AI training and inference workloads. The paper is about cost, utilization, reliability, and how to preempt and resize jobs across a planet-scale cloud environment.

2022 | NSDI 2022 | arXiv:2105.13116

IA-CCF: Individual Accountability for Permissioned Ledgers

Authors: Alex Shamis, Peter Pietzuch, Burak Canakci, Miguel Castro, Cédric Fournet, Edward Ashton, Amaury Chamayou, Sylvan Clebsch, Mark Russinovich, et al. | Venue: 19th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 2022)

IA-CCF extends permissioned ledgers with stronger individual accountability guarantees. The goal is to make it easier to attribute faults and misbehavior even in systems that already rely on Byzantine fault tolerance for baseline safety.

2021

2021 | Communications of the ACM 64 (6), 54-61

Toward Confidential Cloud Computing

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Manuel Costa, Cédric Fournet, David Chisnall, Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, et al. | Venue: Communications of the ACM 64 (6), 54-61

This article lays out the case for extending hardware-enforced protection to data while it is in active use, making confidential computing a first-class cloud security primitive.

2021 | EuroSys 2021

Virtual Machine Preserving Host Updates for Zero Day Patching in Public Cloud

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Naga Govindaraju, Mohan Raghuraman, David Hepkin, Jared Schwartz, et al. | Venue: Proceedings of the Sixteenth European Conference on Computer Systems

This systems paper explains how a public cloud can patch hosts urgently without forcing tenant VMs to stop, reducing both exposure time and operational disruption.

2021 | Queue 19 (1), 49-76

Toward Confidential Cloud Computing: Extending Hardware-Enforced Cryptographic Protection to Data While in Use

Authors: Mark Russinovich, Manuel Costa, Cédric Fournet, David Chisnall, Antoine Delignat-Lavaud, et al. | Venue: Queue 19 (1), 49-76

A longer Queue version of the confidential-computing argument, with additional focus on trust boundaries, attestation, and practical deployment models.

2020

2020 | Communications of the ACM 63 (2), 50-59

Toward ML-Centric Cloud Platforms

Authors: Ricardo Bianchini, Marcus Fontoura, Eli Cortez, Alexandre Muzio, Mark Russinovich, et al. | Venue: Communications of the ACM 63 (2), 50-59

This paper frames how cloud platforms need to evolve when machine-learning workloads become central, with emphasis on utilization, scheduling, and infrastructure design.

2020 | OSDI 2020

Protean: VM Allocation Service at Scale

Authors: Omri Hadary, Luke Marshall, Irit Menache, Adi Pan, Mark Russinovich, et al. | Venue: 14th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2020)

Protean covers large-scale VM allocation in Azure, focusing on the practical tradeoffs required to place workloads efficiently while honoring real-world operational constraints.

2020 | USENIX ATC 20 | arXiv:2003.03423

Serverless in the Wild: Characterizing and Optimizing the Serverless Workload at a Large Cloud Provider

Authors: Mohammad Shahrad, Rodrigo Fonseca, Inigo Goiri, Gohar Chaudhry, Paul Batum, Jason Cooke, Eduardo Laureano, Colby Tresness, Mark Russinovich, Ricardo Bianchini | Venue: 2020 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 20)

This paper studies the real workload mix behind serverless computing at Azure scale. It looks at cold starts, provisioning tradeoffs, and the operational data needed to make serverless platforms both fast and cost-effective.


Selected repositories

RefChecker

A tool for validating academic references, finding broken citations, and catching hallucinated bibliography entries.

github.com/markrussinovich/refchecker

gRPC shared memory transport

Shared-memory transports for gRPC in Go and .NET, built for low-latency co-located communication.

.NET | Go | Library

Other public projects

TaskManagerBitmap, DesktopOrganizerBot, and other experiments live on the GitHub profile.

View all repositories