← Search

Florian Mai

6 accepted papers

2026

In-Training Defenses Against Emergent Misalignment in Language Models

ICML 2026poster

Fine‑tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EMA): Even a small, domain‑specific fine‑tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target domain. Even in the case where model weights are hidden behi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Triple-Encoders: Representations That Fire Together, Wire Together

ACL 2024long

Search-based dialog models typically re-encode the dialog history at every turn, incurring high cost.Curved Contrastive Learning, a representation learning method that encodes relative distances between utterances into the embedding space via a bi-encoder, has recently shown promising results for di…

2023

BQ-NCO: Bisimulation Quotienting for Efficient Neural Combinatorial Optimization

NeurIPS 2023poster

Despite the success of neural-based combinatorial optimization methods for end-to-end heuristic learning, out-of-distribution generalization remains a challenge. In this paper, we present a novel formulation of Combinatorial Optimization Problems (COPs) as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) that effec…

2023

HyperMixer: An MLP-based Low Cost Alternative to Transformers

ACL 2023long

Transformer-based architectures are the model of choice for natural language understanding, but they come at a significant cost, as they have quadratic complexity in the input length, require a lot of training data, and can be difficult to tune. In the pursuit of lower costs, we investigate simple M…

2020

Optimizer Benchmarking Needs to Account for Hyperparameter Tuning

ICML 2020poster

The performance of optimizers, particularly in deep learning, depends considerably on their chosen hyperparameter configuration. The efficacy of optimizers is often studied under near-optimal problem-specific hyperparameters, and finding these settings may be prohibitively costly for practitioners.…

Cited by 62SourcePDFScholar
2019

CBOW Is Not All You Need: Combining CBOW with the Compositional Matrix Space Model

ICLR 2019poster

Continuous Bag of Words (CBOW) is a powerful text embedding method. Due to its strong capabilities to encode word content, CBOW embeddings perform well on a wide range of downstream tasks while being efficient to compute. However, CBOW is not capable of capturing the word order. The reason is that t…