Atharv Singh Patlan

PhD Student, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Princeton University

Don't you know that only fools are satisfied? — Billy Joel, Vienna

I am a PhD student at Princeton University, advised by Prof. Pramod Viswanath and Prof. Prateek Mittal. I study the reliability and security of language agents.

My work looks at how real-world agents are designed and deployed to find the ways they fail, such as prompt injection and context manipulation. I build automated red-teaming frameworks in which agents probe and evaluate other agents and their defenses, and I design defenses that work through a model's internal mechanisms to steer it toward desirable behavior.

Before Princeton, I received my B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur. This past summer, I built a startup in stealth as an AI security researcher.

Highlights

2026Cross-User Poisoning, on failures in multi-user collaborative agents, accepted at NeurIPS 2026.
2026Real AI Agents with Fake Memories to appear at Financial Cryptography 2026.
2026Humanity's Last Exam, a benchmark I contributed to, published in Nature.
2025Our attacks on Web3 agents were covered by Ars Technica and other security outlets.
2025Received the UiPath ICML Student Travel Grant.

Publications

A Two-Neuron Edit To Mitigate Prompt Injections with Minimal Model Drift

A. S. Patlan, P. Viswanath, P. Mittal

Preprint In submission, 2026 PDF
Cross-User Poisoning: User-Task Boundary Failures in Multi-User Collaborative Language Agents

A. S. Patlan, P. Sheng, S. A. Hebbar, P. Mittal, P. Viswanath

NeurIPS 2026 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems PDF
Real AI Agents with Fake Memories: Fatal Context Manipulation Attacks on Web3 Agents

A. S. Patlan, P. Sheng, S. A. Hebbar, P. Mittal, P. Viswanath

FC 2026 Financial Cryptography and Data Security arXiv Ars Technica
Locks Tested Without Burglars: Using Coding Assistants to Break Prompt Injection Defenses

A. S. Patlan, P. Viswanath, P. Mittal

NeurIPS 2025 Workshop Reliable Machine Learning PDF
Context Manipulation Attacks: Web Agents are Susceptible to Corrupted Memory

A. S. Patlan, A. Hebbar, P. Viswanath, P. Mittal

ICML 2025 Workshop Computer Use Agents arXiv
BlockTorrent: A Blockchain Enabled Privacy-Preserving Data Availability Protocol for Multistakeholder Scenarios

A. Hill, S. Mishra, A. S. Patlan, A. Dorri, V. Dedeoglu, R. Jurdak, S. Kanhere

IEEE Blockchain 2021 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain Paper

Full list on Google Scholar.

Experience

Stealth startupSummer 2026

AI Security Researcher
D. E. Shaw & Co., HyderabadSummer 2022

Quantitative Developer Intern · Outlier detection for GICS industry classification of S&P 500 equities

Education

Princeton University2024 – present

Ph.D., Electrical and Computer Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur2019 – 2023

B.Tech., Computer Science and Engineering

Honors & Awards

UiPath ICML Student Travel Grant2025
AlphaGrep Merit Scholarship2022
Sudarshan Kasturia Memorial Award2021
Academic Excellence Award, IIT Kanpur (four times)2020 – 2023
All India Rank 189 in JEE Advanced (of ~200,000) and 162 in JEE Main (of ~2 million)2019
Gold Medal, Indian National Chemistry Olympiad; IChO Orientation-cum-Selection Camp2019
KVPY Fellowship, All India Rank 85 (SX stream)2017 – 2018

About Me

Outside of research, I try to spend as much time outdoors as I can. I love hiking, especially to alpine lakes I can swim in. I am also a scuba diver and have dived in Tioman, Nha Trang, and St. Kitts. The rest of the time I am usually reading; right now I am working through Iain M. Banks's Culture series.

In my adult life, I have been blessed to live in many cities that have shaped me: Gurgaon, where my family is; Kanpur, where I studied; Hyderabad; Singapore; Princeton; Sunnyvale; and San Francisco. My path has loosely followed the old advice to “Go West, young man, go West,” but I would still call New York the city of my dreams.