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Christopher Kanan

16 accepted papers

2026

Position: Modular Memory is the Key to Continual Learning Agents

ICML 2026spotlight

Foundation models have transformed machine learning through large-scale pretraining, massive parameterization, and increased test-time compute. Despite surpassing human performance in several domains, these models remain fundamentally limited in continuous operation, experience accumulation, and per…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Controlling Neural Collapse Enhances Out-of-Distribution Detection and Transfer Learning

ICML 2025poster

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and OOD generalization are widely studied in Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), yet their relationship remains poorly understood. We empirically show that the degree of Neural Collapse (NC) in a network layer is inversely related with these objectives: stronger NC impro…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Dynamic Sparse Training of Diagonally Sparse Networks

ICML 2025poster

Recent advances in Dynamic Sparse Training (DST) have pushed the frontier of sparse neural network training in structured and unstructured contexts, matching dense-model performance while drastically reducing parameter counts to facilitate model scaling. However, unstructured sparsity often fails to…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

BloomVQA: Assessing Hierarchical Multi-modal Comprehension

ACL 2024findings

We propose a novel VQA dataset, BloomVQA, to facilitate comprehensive evaluation of large vision-language models on comprehension tasks. Unlike current benchmarks that often focus on fact-based memorization and simple reasoning tasks without theoretical grounding, we collect multiple-choice samples…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

What Variables Affect Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Pretrained Models?

NeurIPS 2024poster

Embeddings produced by pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely used; however, their efficacy for downstream tasks can vary widely. We study the factors influencing transferability and out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of pre-trained DNN embeddings through the lens of the tunnel eff…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2022

Detecting Out-Of-Context Objects Using Graph Contextual Reasoning Network

IJCAI 2022poster

This paper presents an approach for detecting out-of-context (OOC) objects in images. Given an image with a set of objects, our goal is to determine if an object is inconsistent with the contextual relations and detect the OOC object with a bounding box. In this work, we consider common contextual r…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2022

OccamNets: Mitigating Dataset Bias by Favoring Simpler Hypotheses

ECCV 2022poster

"Dataset bias and spurious correlations can significantly impair generalization in deep neural networks. Many prior efforts have addressed this problem using either alternative loss functions or sampling strategies that focus on rare patterns. We propose a new direction: modifying the network archit…

2020

On the Value of Out-of-Distribution Testing: An Example of Goodhart's Law

NeurIPS 2020poster

Out-of-distribution (OOD) testing is increasingly popular for evaluating a machine learning system's ability to generalize beyond the biases of a training set. OOD benchmarks are designed to present a different joint distribution of data and labels between training and test time. VQA-CP has become t…

Cited by 173SourcePDFScholar
2020

REMIND Your Neural Network to Prevent Catastrophic Forgetting

ECCV 2020poster

People learn throughout life. However, incrementally updating conventional neural networks leads to catastrophic forgetting. A common remedy is replay, which is inspired by how the brain consolidates memory. Replay involves fine-tuning a network on a mixture of new and old instances. While there is…

2019

Answer Them All! Toward Universal Visual Question Answering Models

CVPR 2019poster

Visual Question Answering (VQA) research is split into two camps: the first focuses on VQA datasets that require natural image understanding and the second focuses on synthetic datasets that test reasoning. A good VQA algorithm should be capable of both, but only a few VQA algorithms are tested in t…

Cited by 108PDFcodeScholar
2018

DVQA: Understanding Data Visualizations via Question Answering

CVPR 2018poster

Bar charts are an effective way to convey numeric information, but today's algorithms cannot parse them. Existing methods fail when faced with even minor variations in appearance. Here, we present DVQA, a dataset that tests many aspects of bar chart understanding in a question answering framework. U…