Ignacy Stepka

ignacy_thumbnail.jpg

PhD Student @ Auton Lab

Machine Learning Department

Carnegie Mellon University

I’m currently working as a research assistant at Carnegie Mellon University with Dr. Artur Dubrawski in AutonLab. Right now, I mostly spend time thinking about gradient inversion attacks and privacy issues of federated learning. Before, I spent some time developing adaptive strategies for handling persistent agent failures in decentralized federated learning. I’ve also worked on formal verification of Bayesian Networks and contributed to the DARPA Triage Challenge, developing a Bayesian Network prototype with medical experts for autonomous triage during mass casualty incidents.

I’ve spent time as a research assistant at the Machine Learning Laboratory at Poznan University of Technology, collaborating with Prof. Jerzy Stefanowski and Dr. Mateusz Lango on developing robust counterfactual explanations for black-box model explainability.

I’ve also been part of the R&D team at Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (Polish Academy of Sciences), contributing to EU-funded projects involving black-box model analysis and anomaly detection in industrial automotive and HPC environments.

I graduated from Poznan University of Technology with a B.Sc. in Artificial Intelligence in early 2025.

news

selected publications

  1. Conference
    Counterfactual Explanations with Probabilistic Guarantees on their Robustness to Model Change
    Ignacy Stępka, Mateusz Lango, and Jerzy Stefanowski
    In 31st SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining - Research Track, 2025