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Iacopo Poli

4 accepted papers

2025

Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference

ACL 2025long

Encoder-only transformer models such as BERT offer a great performance-size tradeoff for retrieval and classification tasks with respect to larger decoder-only models. Despite being the workhorse of numerous production pipelines, there have been limited Pareto improvements to BERT since its release.…

2022

Adversarial Robustness by Design Through Analog Computing And Synthetic Gradients

ICASSP 2022accepted

We propose a new defense mechanism against adversarial at-tacks inspired by an optical co-processor, providing robustness without compromising natural accuracy in both white-box and black-box settings. This hardware co-processor performs a nonlinear fixed random transformation, where the parameters…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

Photonic Differential Privacy with Direct Feedback Alignment

NeurIPS 2021poster

Optical Processing Units (OPUs) -- low-power photonic chips dedicated to large scale random projections -- have been used in previous work to train deep neural networks using Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA), an effective alternative to backpropagation. Here, we demonstrate how to leverage the intrin…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2020

Direct Feedback Alignment Scales to Modern Deep Learning Tasks and Architectures

NeurIPS 2020poster

Despite being the workhorse of deep learning, the backpropagation algorithm is no panacea. It enforces sequential layer updates, thus preventing efficient parallelization of the training process. Furthermore, its biological plausibility is being challenged. Alternative schemes have been devised; yet…