Anthony Hughes

Anthony Hughes

PhD Student, Computer Science
ajhughes3 at sheffield.ac.uk

I am pursuing my Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.

Research:My PhD research investigates privacy in deep learning (DL), in particular how DL models leak sensitive information at inference time.

Recent work: My EMNLP 2025 investigates private summarisation. Currently project uses circuit discovery to understand weakness in existing PII leakage defense.

Past: I completed my MSc in Computational Linguistics (Distinction) from University of Wolverhampton, and my undergraduate degree in Computer Science (1st Class, Hons) from Nottingham Trent University.

Selected Publications

PATCH: Mitigating PII Leakage in Language Models with Privacy-Aware Targeted Circuit PatcHing
Preprint 2025
How Private are Language Models in Abstractive Summarisation?
EMNLP 2025 - Main Proceedings
Identifying and Aligning Medical Claims Made on Social Media with Medical Evidence
LREC-COLING 2024
Understanding Inflicted Injuries in Young Children: Toward an Ontology-based Approach
EKAW 2024
Generative Byte-Level Models for Restoring Spaces, Punctuation, and Capitalization in Multiple Languages
Practical Solutions for Diverse Real-World NLP Applications 2023

Research Experience

Visiting Graduate Researcher
Cryptography, Security and Privacy Group (CrySP), University of Waterloo
July 2025 - September 2025

Collaborators/Mentors: Vasisht Duddu, N. Asokan. Research on mechanistic approaches to understanding PII leakage in language models.

Industry Experience

Lead Software Engineer / NLP Engineer
Data Language
January 2014 - September 2023

Led development of NLP-based products including automated text classification SaaS, data visualization tools, and integration of language models into data platforms. Built production systems serving major clients including GFK.

Software Engineer
Ontoba
June 2013 - June 2014

Software Engineer working on services solving data silo issues with linked data.

Software Engineer (Internship)
Press Association
July 2011 - September 2012

Worked on a new digital platform centered around semantic web technologies.

Education

PhD Computer Science
University of Sheffield, 2024 - Current
PgDip Speech and Language Technologies
University of Sheffield, 2023 - 2024
MSc Computational Linguistics (Distinction)
University of Wolverhampton, 2021 - 2023
BSc Computer Science (1st Class, Hons)
Nottingham Trent University, 2009 - 2013

Selected Awards

UKRI PhD Scholarship
University of Sheffield, 2023-2027
NIHR/BRC Sheffield Funding
£1,650, April 2025 - Present
Best Poster
Insigneo Showcase, July 2025

Technical Skills

Programming Languages:

Python, JavaScript

Machine Learning & NLP:

PyTorch, Transformers, TransformerLens, AutoCircuit, Scikit-learn, NLTK

Research Tools:

Mechanistic interpretability frameworks, circuit analysis, privacy-preserving ML techniques

Databases & Search:

PostgreSQL/SQL, GraphDB/SPARQL, Elasticsearch, QDrant