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Alex Fang

15 accepted papers

2026

Reusing Pre-Training Data at Test Time is a Compute Multiplier

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models learn from their vast pre-training corpora, gaining the ability to solve an ever increasing variety of tasks; yet although researchers work to improve these datasets, there is little effort to understand how efficient the pre-training apparatus is at extracting ideas and knowle…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Datasets, Documents, and Repetitions: The Practicalities of Unequal Data Quality

NeurIPS 2025poster

Data filtering has become a powerful tool for improving model performance while reducing computational cost. However, as large language model compute budgets continue to grow, the limited data volume provided by heavily filtered and deduplicated datasets will become a practical constraint. In effort…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Language models scale reliably with over-training and on downstream tasks

ICLR 2025poster

Scaling laws are useful guides for derisking expensive training runs, as they predict performance of large models using cheaper, small-scale experiments. However, there remain gaps between current scaling studies and how language models are ultimately trained and evaluated. For instance, scaling is…

2024

CLIPLoss and Norm-Based Data Selection Methods for Multimodal Contrastive Learning

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Data selection has emerged as a core issue for large-scale visual-language model pretaining (e.g., CLIP), particularly with noisy web-curated datasets. Three main data selection approaches are: (1) leveraging external non-CLIP models to aid data selection, (2) training new CLIP-style embedding model…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Data Filtering Networks

ICLR 2024poster

Large training sets have become a cornerstone of machine learning and are the foundation for recent advances in language modeling and multimodal learning. While data curation for pre-training is often still ad-hoc, one common paradigm is to first collect a massive pool of data from the Web and then…

Cited by 153SourcePDFScholar
2024

DataComp-LM: In search of the next generation of training sets for language models

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce DataComp for Language Models, a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models. As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad s…

Cited by 64SourcePDFScholar
2024

URDFormer: A Pipeline for Constructing Articulated Simulation Environments from Real-World Images

RSS 2024poster

Constructing accurate and targeted simulation scenes that are both visually and physically realistic is a problem of significant practical interest in domains ranging from robotics to computer vision. This problem has become even more relevant as researchers wielding large data-hungry learning metho…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2023

DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets

NeurIPS 2023oral

Multimodal datasets are a critical component in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion and GPT-4, yet their design does not receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce Data…

2023

Multimodal C4: An Open, Billion-scale Corpus of Images Interleaved with Text

NeurIPS 2023poster

In-context vision and language models like Flamingo support arbitrarily interleaved sequences of images and text as input. This format not only enables few-shot learning via interleaving independent supervised (image, text) examples, but also, more complex prompts involving interaction between image…

2023

Neural Priming for Sample-Efficient Adaptation

NeurIPS 2023poster

We propose Neural Priming, a technique for adapting large pretrained models to distribution shifts and downstream tasks given few or no labeled examples. Presented with class names or unlabeled test samples, Neural Priming enables the model to recall and conditions its parameters on relevant data se…

2023

Neural Radiance Field Codebooks

ICLR 2023poster

Compositional representations of the world are a promising step towards enabling high-level scene understanding and efficient transfer to downstream tasks. Learning such representations for complex scenes and tasks remains an open challenge. Towards this goal, we introduce Neural Radiance Field Code…

2022

Data Determines Distributional Robustness in Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP)

ICML 2022spotlight

Contrastively trained language-image models such as CLIP, ALIGN, and BASIC have demonstrated unprecedented robustness to multiple challenging natural distribution shifts. Since these language-image models differ from previous training approaches in several ways, an important question is what causes…

2020

Evaluating Machine Accuracy on ImageNet

ICML 2020poster

We evaluate a wide range of ImageNet models with five trained human labelers. In our year-long experiment, trained humans first annotated 40,000 images from the ImageNet and ImageNetV2 test sets with multi-class labels to enable a semantically coherent evaluation. Then we measured the classification…

Cited by 205SourcePDFScholar
2020

Neural Kernels Without Tangents

ICML 2020poster

We investigate the connections between neural networks and simple building blocks in kernel space. In particular, using well established feature space tools such as direct sum, averaging, and moment lifting, we present an algebra for creating “compositional” kernels from bags of features. We show th…

Cited by 110SourcePDFScholar