Kerem Zaman
PhD student at UNC Chapel Hill
UNC Chapel Hill
NC, USA
I’m currently a fourth-year PhD student at the UNC-Chapel Hill where I am advised by Shashank Srivastava. My research focuses on interpretable and explainable NLP, AI safety, reasoning, fairness, and robustness. My ultimate goal is to advance safe and transparent AI systems by deepening our understanding of black-box models.
Currently I’m a Student Researcher at Google DeepMind in NYC working with Neha Kalibhat and Mani Malek. I spent my previous summer at IFM MBZUAI Silicon Valley Lab with Mikhail Yurochkin. Before PhD, I earned my bachelor’s degree from the Department of Computer Engineering Boğaziçi University, where my thesis advisor was Pinar Yanardag.
news
| May 10, 2026 | Paper accepted into ACL 2026 as oral! “Is Chain-of-Thought really “not explainability”? [pdf] [code] |
|---|---|
| Apr 20, 2026 | This summer I’ll be interning at Google DeepMind NYC Office! |
| Jan 27, 2026 | Paper accepted into ICLR 2026! “DiffVax: Optimization-Free Image Immunization Against Diffusion-Based Editing” [pdf] [website] |
| Dec 30, 2025 | New preprint! Is Chain-of-Thought really “not explainability”? [pdf] |
| Nov 7, 2025 | Selected as an Outstanding Reviewer at EMNLP 2025 (<1%)! |