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Cyrus Rashtchian

14 accepted papers

2026

Latent Concept Disentanglement in Transformer-based Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

When large language models (LLMs) use in-context learning (ICL) to solve a new task, they must infer latent concepts from demonstration examples. This raises the question of whether and how transformers represent latent structures as part of their computation. Our work experiments with several contr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

On the Generalization Gap in Self-Evolving Language Model Reasoning

ICML 2026poster

Recent work suggests that LLMs can improve their abilities through \textit{self-evolution}, using only internally generated supervision. A central open question, however, is not whether self-evolution can help, but: \textit{how far is it from oracle-supervised training under minimal assumptions?} To…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Position: Explainability Research Must Prioritize Foundations over Ad-hoc Methods

ICML 2026poster

Despite the proliferation of Explainable AI (XAI) techniques—from feature attributions to sparse autoencoders—explanations rarely influence real-world workflows. In practice, they are often generated and discarded without guiding meaningful action. This gap reflects foundational shortcomings: resear…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

A Implies B: Circuit Analysis in LLMs for Propositional Logical Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Due to the size and complexity of modern large language models (LLMs), it has proven challenging to uncover the underlying mechanisms that models use to solve reasoning problems. For instance, is their reasoning for a specific problem localized to certain parts of the network? Do they break down the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DreamSync: Aligning Text-to-Image Generation with Image Understanding Feedback

NAACL 2025long

Despite their widespread success, Text-to-Image models (T2I) still struggle to produce images that are both aesthetically pleasing and faithful to the user’s input text. We introduce DreamSync, a simple yet effective training algorithm that improves T2I models to be faithful to the text input. Dream…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar
2025

Revisiting text-to-image evaluation with Gecko: on metrics, prompts, and human rating

ICLR 2025spotlight

While text-to-image (T2I) generative models have become ubiquitous, they do not necessarily generate images that align with a given prompt. While many metrics and benchmarks have been proposed to evaluate T2I models and alignment metrics, the impact of the evaluation components (prompt sets, human…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2025

Sufficient Context: A New Lens on Retrieval Augmented Generation Systems

ICLR 2025poster

Augmenting LLMs with context leads to improved performance across many applications. Despite much research on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, an open question is whether errors arise because LLMs fail to utilize the context from retrieval or the context itself is insufficient to answer…

2024

SLED: Self Logits Evolution Decoding for Improving Factuality in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their outputs can sometimes be unreliable or factually incorrect. To address this, we introduce Self Logits Evolution Decoding (SLED), a novel decoding framework that enhances the truthfulness of LLMs without relying on exte…

2023

Benchmarking Robustness to Adversarial Image Obfuscations

NeurIPS 2023poster

Automated content filtering and moderation is an important tool that allows online platforms to build striving user communities that facilitate cooperation and prevent abuse. Unfortunately, resourceful actors try to bypass automated filters in a bid to post content that violate platform policies and…

2022

A Theoretical View on Sparsely Activated Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Deep and wide neural networks successfully fit very complex functions today, but dense models are starting to be prohibitively expensive for inference. To mitigate this, one promising research direction is networks that activate a sparse subgraph of the network. The subgraph is chosen by a data-depe…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Closer Look at Accuracy vs. Robustness

NeurIPS 2020poster

Current methods for training robust networks lead to a drop in test accuracy, which has led prior works to posit that a robustness-accuracy tradeoff may be inevitable in deep learning. We take a closer look at this phenomenon and first show that real image datasets are actually separated. With this…

2020

Explainable k-Means and k-Medians Clustering

ICML 2020poster

Many clustering algorithms lead to cluster assignments that are hard to explain, partially because they depend on all the features of the data in a complicated way. To improve interpretability, we consider using a small decision tree to partition a data set into clusters, so that clusters can be cha…

2020

Robustness for Non-Parametric Classification: A Generic Attack and Defense

AISTATS 2020poster

Adversarially robust machine learning has received much recent attention. However, prior attacks and defenses for non-parametric classifiers have been developed in an ad-hoc or classifier-specific basis. In this work, we take a holistic look at adversarial examples for non-parametric classifiers, in…

2017

Clustering Billions of Reads for DNA Data Storage

NeurIPS 2017spotlight

Storing data in synthetic DNA offers the possibility of improving information density and durability by several orders of magnitude compared to current storage technologies. However, DNA data storage requires a computationally intensive process to retrieve the data. In particular, a crucial step in…

Cited by 92SourcePDFScholar