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Aahlad Manas Puli

8 accepted papers

2025

Learning Is Not A Race: Improving Retrieval in Language Models via Equal Learning

EMNLP 2025

Many applications that modern large language models (LLMs) are deployed on are retrieval tasks: the answer can be recovered from context and success is a matter of learning generalizable features from data. However, this is easier said than done. Overparametrized models trained on cross-entropy loss

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Contrasting with Symile: Simple Model-Agnostic Representation Learning for Unlimited Modalities

NeurIPS 2024poster

Contrastive learning methods, such as CLIP, leverage naturally paired data—for example, images and their corresponding text captions—to learn general representations that transfer efficiently to downstream tasks. While such approaches are generally applied to two modalities, domains such as robotics…

2024

Explanations that reveal all through the definition of encoding

NeurIPS 2024poster

Feature attributions attempt to highlight what inputs drive predictive power. Good attributions or explanations are thus those that produce inputs that retain this predictive power; accordingly, evaluations of explanations score their quality of prediction. However, evaluations produce scores better…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Don’t blame Dataset Shift! Shortcut Learning due to Gradients and Cross Entropy

NeurIPS 2023poster

Common explanations for shortcut learning assume that the shortcut improves prediction only under the training distribution. Thus, models trained in the typical way by minimizing log-loss using gradient descent, which we call default-ERM, should utilize the shortcut. However, even when the stable fe…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2022

Out-of-distribution Generalization in the Presence of Nuisance-Induced Spurious Correlations

ICLR 2022poster

In many prediction problems, spurious correlations are induced by a changing relationship between the label and a nuisance variable that is also correlated with the covariates. For example, in classifying animals in natural images, the background, which is a nuisance, can predict the type of animal.…

2021

Inverse-Weighted Survival Games

NeurIPS 2021poster

Deep models trained through maximum likelihood have achieved state-of-the-art results for survival analysis. Despite this training scheme, practitioners evaluate models under other criteria, such as binary classification losses at a chosen set of time horizons, e.g. Brier score (BS) and Bernoulli lo…