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James Diffenderfer

14 accepted papers

2026

Position: Zeroth-Order Optimization in Deep Learning Is Underexplored, Not Underpowered

ICML 2026spotlight

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization, learning from finite differences of function evaluations without backpropagation, has recently regained attention in deep learning due to its memory efficiency and applicability to gray- or black-box pipelines. Yet, ZO methods are often dismissed as fundamentally unsc…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BOOM: Benchmarking Out-Of-distribution Molecular Property Predictions of Machine Learning Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Data-driven molecular discovery leverages artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) and generative modeling to filter and design novel molecules. Discovering novel molecules requires accurate out-of-distribution (OOD) predictions, but ML models struggle to generalize OOD. Currently, no system…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Trajectory Balance with Asynchrony: Decoupling Exploration and Learning for Fast, Scalable LLM Post-Training

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a critical component of large language model (LLM) post-training. However, on-policy algorithms used for post-training are not naturally robust to a diversified content of experience replay buffers, which asynchronous off-policy actors can efficiently populate in paral…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

TruthPrInt: Mitigating Large Vision-Language Models Object Hallucination Via Latent Truthful-Guided Pre-Intervention

ICCV 2025poster

Object Hallucination (OH) has been acknowledged as one of the major trustworthy challenges in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs). Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) indicate that internal states, such as hidden states, encode the "overall truthfulness" of generated responses. Howe…

2024

Adversarial Robustness Limits via Scaling-Law and Human-Alignment Studies

ICML 2024poster

This paper revisits the simple, long-studied, yet still unsolved problem of making image classifiers robust to imperceptible perturbations. Taking CIFAR10 as an example, SOTA clean accuracy is about $100$%, but SOTA robustness to $\ell_{\infty}$-norm bounded perturbations barely exceeds $70$%. To un…

2024

Decoding Compressed Trust: Scrutinizing the Trustworthiness of Efficient LLMs Under Compression

ICML 2024poster

Compressing high-capability Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a favored strategy for resource-efficient inferences. While state-of-the-art (SoTA) compression methods boast impressive advancements in preserving benign task performance, the potential risks of compression in terms of safety a…

2024

DeepZero: Scaling Up Zeroth-Order Optimization for Deep Model Training

ICLR 2024poster

Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization has become a popular technique for solving machine learning (ML) problems when first-order (FO) information is difficult or impossible to obtain. However, the scalability of ZO optimization remains an open problem: Its use has primarily been limited to relatively small…

2024

GTBench: Uncovering the Strategic Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs via Game-Theoretic Evaluations

NeurIPS 2024poster

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are integrated into critical real-world applications, their strategic and logical reasoning abilities are increasingly crucial. This paper evaluates LLMs' reasoning abilities in competitive environments through game-theoretic tasks, e.g., board and card games that req…

Cited by 50SourcePDFScholar
2024

ReTA: Recursively Thinking Ahead to Improve the Strategic Reasoning of Large Language Models

NAACL 2024long

Current logical reasoning evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily focus on single-turn and static environments, such as arithmetic problems. The crucial problem of multi-turn, strategic reasoning is under-explored. In this work, we analyze the multi-turn strategic reasoning of LLMs thr…

2024

SOUL: Unlocking the Power of Second-Order Optimization for LLM Unlearning

EMNLP 2024main

Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the necessity of effective unlearning mechanisms to comply with data regulations and ethical AI practices. LLM unlearning aims at removing undesired data influences and associated model capabilities without compromising utility beyond the scope of unlear…

2023

Neural Image Compression: Generalization, Robustness, and Spectral Biases

NeurIPS 2023poster

Recent advances in neural image compression (NIC) have produced models that are starting to outperform classic codecs. While this has led to growing excitement about using NIC in real-world applications, the successful adoption of any machine learning system in the wild requires it to generalize (an…

2022

Models Out of Line: A Fourier Lens on Distribution Shift Robustness

NeurIPS 2022accept

Improving the accuracy of deep neural networks on out-of-distribution (OOD) data is critical to an acceptance of deep learning in real world applications. It has been observed that accuracies on in-distribution (ID) versus OOD data follow a linear trend and models that outperform this baseline are e…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2021

A Winning Hand: Compressing Deep Networks Can Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness

NeurIPS 2021poster

Successful adoption of deep learning (DL) in the wild requires models to be: (1) compact, (2) accurate, and (3) robust to distributional shifts. Unfortunately, efforts towards simultaneously meeting these requirements have mostly been unsuccessful. This raises an important question: Is the inability…

2021

Multi-Prize Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Accurate Binary Neural Networks by Pruning A Randomly Weighted Network

ICLR 2021poster

Recently, Frankle & Carbin (2019) demonstrated that randomly-initialized dense networks contain subnetworks that once found can be trained to reach test accuracy comparable to the trained dense network. However, finding these high performing trainable subnetworks is expensive, requiring iterative pr…