Egor Zverev

Hi! My name is Egor and I am a PhD student at ISTA, Austria, working under the supervision of Christoph Lampert. I am also a member of the ELLIS PhD Program co-supervised by Florian Tramèr from ETH Zürich.

I am broadly interested in AI Safety and Security, with a particular focus on improving LLM Security through architectures. In my previous work I have formalized the problem of instruction-data separation (i.e., what it means for the model to separate executable instructions from non-executable data) and proposed a method to increase such separation through architectural changes.

Before coming to ISTA, I got my B.S.(Hons) in Applied Math and CS from the Yandex Department of Data Analysis at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, where I also taught python and stats. You can find my full CV here.

I also enjoy doing creative and community-driven gigs. I was the main organizer for the Foundations of LLM Security Workshop @EurIPS'25 and the LLM Safety and Security ELLIS UnConference'25. I co-created one of the AI art booths for ISTA Summer Campus, and in my spare time, I write poetry and tinker with Arduino.

I am always open to new connections, professional and otherwise, feel free to send me an email at [first_name].[last_name]@ist.ac.at. Let's chat!

Egor Zverev

Publications

ASIDE: Architectural Separation of Instructions and Data in Language Models

Egor Zverev, Evgenii Kortukov, Alexander Panfilov, Alexandra Volkova, Soroush Tabesh, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Wojciech Samek, Christoph H. Lampert
ICLR 2026
ICLR 2025 Workshop on Building Trust in Language Models and Applications (Oral)

Can LLMs Separate Instructions From Data? And What Do We Even Mean By That?

Egor Zverev, Sahar Abdelnabi, Soroush Tabesh, Mario Fritz, Christoph H. Lampert
ICLR 2025

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

Sahar Abdelnabi, Aideen Fay, Ahmed Salem, Egor Zverev, Kai-Chieh Liao, ... Andrew Paverd, Giovanni Cherubin
EurIPS 2025 Salon des Refusés (papers with high scores rejected from NeurIPS'25 due to capacity constraints)

News

February 2026
I am attending IASEAI'26 in Paris. I will give a talk about ASIDE and be a panelist in the follow-up session. Exciting!
January 2026
ASIDE got accepted to ICLR 2026!
October 2025
I am co-organizing the Foundations of LLM Security Workshop @EurIPS'25! Call for talks open until Oct 22. Proud of the speakers we have at the event: Ilia Shumailov, Santiago Zanella-Béguelin, Kathrin Grosse and Verena Rieser.
October 2025
I am co-organizing the LLM Safety and Security ELLIS UnConference'25 workshop! We have really nice speakers: Isabel Valera, Pepa Atanasova and Qiongxiu Li.
September 2025
I have co-affiliated with Prof. Florian Tramèr (ETHZ) through ELLIS PhD Program! I am visiting ETHZ from September to December to work on LLM Agents Security.
September 2025
Gave at talk on instruction-data separation at IBM T.J. Watson Research Lab. Thank you Rosario Uceda-Sosa for hosting me!
August 2025
Attended CISPA - ELLIS - Summer School 2025 on Trustworthy AI in Saarbrücken, Germany.
June 2025
Our paper on LLMail-Inject competition is out. Check it out here. Had a fun time collaborating with Microsoft on this!
May 2025
Attended ICLR 2025 in Singapore to present SEP and ASIDE papers. Gave a talk about ASIDE at the BuildTrust workshop.
March 2025
Our paper "ASIDE: Architectural Separation of Instructions and Data in Language Models" was accepted to ICLR 2025 BuildTrust workshop for an oral presentation!
March 2025
Gave an invited talk at ETH about ASIDE. Grateful to Florian Tramèr for hosting me!
January 2025
Our paper "Can LLMs Separate Instructions From Data? And What Do We Even Mean By That?" was accepted to ICLR 2025!
October 2024
I am co-organizing LLMail-Inject competition with Microsoft. Check it out here.