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Colin White

21 accepted papers

2026

Can LLMs Reason Structurally? Benchmarking via the lens of Data Structures

ICML 2026poster

Large language models (LLMs) are deployed on increasingly complex tasks that require multi-step decision-making. Understanding their algorithmic reasoning abilities is therefore crucial. However, we lack a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating this capability. We propose data structures as a principle…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

LiveBench: A Challenging, Contamination-Limited LLM Benchmark

ICLR 2025spotlight

Test set contamination, wherein test data from a benchmark ends up in a newer model's training set, is a well-documented obstacle for fair LLM evaluation and can quickly render benchmarks obsolete. To mitigate this, many recent benchmarks crowdsource new prompts and evaluations from human or LLM jud…

2024

Guaranteed Approximation Bounds for Mixed-Precision Neural Operators

ICLR 2024poster

Neural operators, such as Fourier Neural Operators (FNO), form a principled approach for learning solution operators for partial differential equations (PDE) and other mappings between function spaces. However, many real-world problems require high-resolution training data, and the training time and…

2024

Pretraining Codomain Attention Neural Operators for Solving Multiphysics PDEs

NeurIPS 2024poster

Existing neural operator architectures face challenges when solving multiphysics problems with coupled partial differential equations (PDEs) due to complex geometries, interactions between physical variables, and the limited amounts of high-resolution training data. To address these issues, we prop…

Cited by 20SourcePDFScholar
2024

To the Cutoff... and Beyond? A Longitudinal Perspective on LLM Data Contamination

ICLR 2024poster

Recent claims about the impressive abilities of large language models (LLMs) are often supported by evaluating publicly available benchmarks. Since LLMs train on wide swaths of the internet, this practice raises concerns of data contamination, i.e., evaluating on examples that are explicitly or imp…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2024

TuneTables: Context Optimization for Scalable Prior-Data Fitted Networks

NeurIPS 2024poster

While tabular classification has traditionally relied on from-scratch training, a recent breakthrough called prior-data fitted networks (PFNs) challenges this approach. Similar to large language models, PFNs make use of pretraining and in-context learning to achieve strong performance on new tasks i…

Cited by 26SourcePDFScholar
2023

ForecastPFN: Synthetically-Trained Zero-Shot Forecasting

NeurIPS 2023poster

The vast majority of time-series forecasting approaches require a substantial training dataset. However, many real-life forecasting applications have very little initial observations, sometimes just 40 or fewer. Thus, the applicability of most forecasting methods is restricted in data-sparse commerc…

2023

Rethinking Bias Mitigation: Fairer Architectures Make for Fairer Face Recognition

NeurIPS 2023oral

Face recognition systems are widely deployed in safety-critical applications, including law enforcement, yet they exhibit bias across a range of socio-demographic dimensions, such as gender and race. Conventional wisdom dictates that model biases arise from biased training data. As a consequence,…

2023

When Do Neural Nets Outperform Boosted Trees on Tabular Data?

NeurIPS 2023poster

Tabular data is one of the most commonly used types of data in machine learning. Despite recent advances in neural nets (NNs) for tabular data, there is still an active discussion on whether or not NNs generally outperform gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDTs) on tabular data, with several recent…

2022

NAS-Bench-Suite-Zero: Accelerating Research on Zero Cost Proxies

NeurIPS 2022accept

Zero-cost proxies (ZC proxies) are a recent architecture performance prediction technique aiming to significantly speed up algorithms for neural architecture search (NAS). Recent work has shown that these techniques show great promise, but certain aspects, such as evaluating and exploiting their com…

2022

NAS-Bench-Suite: NAS Evaluation is (Now) Surprisingly Easy

ICLR 2022poster

The release of tabular benchmarks, such as NAS-Bench-101 and NAS-Bench-201, has significantly lowered the computational overhead for conducting scientific research in neural architecture search (NAS). Although they have been widely adopted and used to tune real-world NAS algorithms, these benchmarks…

2022

On the Generalizability and Predictability of Recommender Systems

NeurIPS 2022accept

While other areas of machine learning have seen more and more automation, designing a high-performing recommender system still requires a high level of human effort. Furthermore, recent work has shown that modern recommender system algorithms do not always improve over well-tuned baselines. A natura…

2021

BANANAS: Bayesian Optimization with Neural Architectures for Neural Architecture Search

AAAI 2021technical

Over the past half-decade, many methods have been considered for neural architecture search (NAS). Bayesian optimization (BO), which has long had success in hyperparameter optimization, has recently emerged as a very promising strategy for NAS when it is coupled with a neural predictor. Recent work…

2021

How Powerful are Performance Predictors in Neural Architecture Search?

NeurIPS 2021poster

Early methods in the rapidly developing field of neural architecture search (NAS) required fully training thousands of neural networks. To reduce this extreme computational cost, dozens of techniques have since been proposed to predict the final performance of neural architectures. Despite the succe…

2021

Synthetic Benchmarks for Scientific Research in Explainable Machine Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

As machine learning models grow more complex and their applications become more high-stakes, tools for explaining model predictions have become increasingly important. This has spurred a flurry of research in model explainability and has given rise to feature attribution methods such as LIME and SHA…

Cited by 86SourcecodeScholar
2020

A Study on Encodings for Neural Architecture Search

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

Neural architecture search (NAS) has been extensively studied in the past few years. A popular approach is to represent each neural architecture in the search space as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), and then search over all DAGs by encoding the adjacency matrix and list of operations as a set of hy…

2020

Intra-Processing Methods for Debiasing Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2020poster

As deep learning models become tasked with more and more decisions that impact human lives, such as criminal recidivism, loan repayment, and face recognition for law enforcement, bias is becoming a growing concern. Debiasing algorithms are typically split into three paradigms: pre-processing, in-pro…

2018

Data-Driven Clustering via Parameterized Lloyd's Families

NeurIPS 2018spotlight

Algorithms for clustering points in metric spaces is a long-studied area of research. Clustering has seen a multitude of work both theoretically, in understanding the approximation guarantees possible for many objective functions such as k-median and k-means clustering, and experimentally, in findin…

Cited by 40SourcePDFScholar
2017

Data Driven Resource Allocation for Distributed Learning

AISTATS 2017poster

In distributed machine learning, data is dispatched to multiple machines for processing. Motivated by the fact that similar data points often belong to the same or similar classes, and more generally, classification rules of high accuracy tend to be “locally simple but globally complex” (Vapnik and…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar