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James Zou

130 accepted papers

2026

Agentic Context Engineering: Learning Comprehensive Contexts for Self-Improving Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Large language model (LLM) applications such as agents and domain-specific reasoning increasingly rely on context adaptation, modifying model inputs with instructions, strategies, or evidence, rather than weight updates. While prior methods improve usability, they often suffer from a brevity bias,…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Can Language Models Discover Scaling Laws?

ICLR 2026poster

Discovering scaling laws for predicting model performance at scale is a fundamental and open-ended challenge, mostly reliant on slow, case specific human experimentation. To investigate the potential for LLMs to automate this process, we collect over 5,000 experiments from existing literature and cu…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Can Small Training Runs Reliably Guide Data Curation? Rethinking Proxy-Model Practice

ICLR 2026poster

Data teams at frontier AI companies routinely train small proxy models to make critical decisions about pretraining data recipes for full-scale training. However, the community has a limited understanding of whether and when conclusions drawn from small-scale experiments reliably transfer to large-s…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Cartridges: Lightweight and general-purpose long context representations via self-study

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models are often used to answer queries grounded in large text corpora (e.g. codebases, legal documents, or chat histories) by placing the entire corpus in the context window and leveraging in-context learning (ICL). Although current models support contexts of 100K-10M tokens, this se…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Cost-of-Pass: An Economic Framework for Evaluating Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

The widespread adoption of AI systems in the economy hinges on their ability to generate economic value that outweighs their inference costs. Evaluating this tradeoff requires metrics that account for both performance and costs. Building on production theory, we develop an economically grounded fram…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

DSGym: A Standardized and Holistic Framework for Advancing Data Science Agents

ICML 2026poster

Data science agents promise to accelerate discovery and insight-generation by turning data into executable analyses and findings. Yet existing data science benchmarks fall short due to fragmented evaluation interfaces that make cross-benchmark comparison difficult, narrow task coverage and a lack of…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

FACET: A Fragment-Aware Conformer Ensemble Transformer

ICLR 2026poster

Accurately predicting molecular properties requires effective integration of structural information from both 2D molecular graphs and their corresponding equilibrium conformer ensembles. In this work, we propose FACET, a scalable Structure-Aware Graph Transformer that efficiently aggregates features…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Graph-of-Agents: A Graph-based Framework for Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration

ICLR 2026poster

With an ever-growing zoo of LLMs and benchmarks, the need to orchestrate multiple models for improved task performance has never been more pressing. While frameworks like Mixture-of-Agents (MoA) attempt to coordinate LLMs, they often fall short in terms of (1) selecting relevant agents, (2) facilita…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

HumanLM: Simulating Users with State Alignment Beats Response Imitation

ICML 2026poster

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to simulate how specific users respond to any context, enabling more user-centric applications that rely on user feedback. However, existing user simulators mostly imitate surface-level patterns and language styles, which fails to reflect the underl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

In-The-Flow Agentic System Optimization for Effective Planning and Tool Use

ICLR 2026oral

Outcome-driven reinforcement learning has advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but prevailing tool-augmented approaches train a single, monolithic policy that interleaves thoughts and tool calls under full context; this scales poorly with long horizons and diverse tools and generalize…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Inference-time scaling of diffusion models through classical search

ICLR 2026poster

Classical search algorithms have long underpinned modern artificial intelligence. In this work, we tackle the challenge of inference-time control in diffusion models—adapting generated outputs to meet diverse test-time objectives—using principles from classical search. We propose a general framework…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

InfoTok: Adaptive Discrete Video Tokenizer via Information-Theoretic Compression

ICLR 2026oral

Accurate and efficient discrete video tokenization is essential for long video sequences processing. Yet, the inherent complexity and variable information density of videos present a significant bottleneck for current tokenizers, which rigidly compress all content at a fixed rate, leading to redunda…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Latent Collaboration in Multi-Agent Systems

ICML 2026spotlight

Multi-agent systems (MAS) extend large language models (LLMs) from independent single-model reasoning to coordinative system-level intelligence. While existing LLM agents depend on text-based mediation for reasoning and communication, we take a step forward by enabling models to collaborate directly…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Learning to Discover at Test Time

ICML 2026spotlight

How can we use AI to discover a new state of the art for a scientific problem? Prior work in test-time scaling, such as AlphaEvolve, performs search by prompting a frozen LLM. We perform reinforcement learning at test time, so the LLM can continue to train, but now with experience specific to the te…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

On the Relationship Between Activation Outliers and Feature Death in Sparse Autoencoders

ICML 2026poster

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose neural network activations into interpretable features, but many features never activate- a problem called feature death. Death rates vary dramatically across models: near-zero on GPT-2, over 70\% on AlphaFold3 with identical SAE configurations. Why? We find that…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Optimas: Optimizing Compound AI Systems with Globally Aligned Local Rewards

ICLR 2026poster

Compound AI systems integrating multiple components, such as Large Language Models, specialized tools, and traditional machine learning models, are increasingly deployed to solve complex real-world tasks. However, optimizing compound systems remains challenging due to their non-differentiable struct…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

PRISM-Physics: Causal DAG-Based Process Evaluation for Physics Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Benchmarks for competition-style reasoning have advanced evaluation in mathematics and programming, yet physics remains comparatively underexplored. Most existing physics benchmarks evaluate only final answers, which fail to capture reasoning processes, while recent stepwise methods rely on heuristi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

TaTToo: Tool-Grounded Thinking PRM for Test-Time Scaling in Tabular Reasoning

ICLR 2026poster

Process Reward Models (PRMs) have recently emerged as a powerful framework for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large reasoning models (LRMs), particularly in the context of test-time scaling (TTS). However, their potential for supervising LRMs on tabular reasoning domains remains underexplor…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

When Does Divide and Conquer Work for Long Context LLM? A Noise Decomposition Framework

ICLR 2026poster

We investigate the challenge of applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to long texts. We propose a theoretical framework that distinguishes the failure modes of long context tasks into three categories: cross-chunk dependence (task noise), confusion that grows with context size (model noise), and the…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

When Visualizing is the First Step to Reasoning: MIRA, a Benchmark for Visual Chain-of-Thought

CVPR 2026

We propose MIRA (Multimodal Imagination for Reasoning Assessment), a new benchmark designed to evaluate models in scenarios where generating intermediate visual images is essential for successful reasoning. Unlike traditional Chain-of-thought (CoT) methods that rely solely on text, tasks in MIRA req

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

reAR: Rethinking Visual Autoregressive Models via Token-wise Consistency Regularization

ICLR 2026poster

Visual autoregressive (AR) generation offers a promising path toward unifying vision and language models, yet its performance remains suboptimal against diffusion models. Prior work often attributes this gap to tokenizer limitations and rasterization ordering. In this work, we identify a core bottle…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

4KAgent: Agentic Any Image to 4K Super-Resolution

NeurIPS 2025poster

We present 4KAgent, a unified agentic super-resolution generalist system designed to universally upscale any image to 4K resolution (and even higher, if applied iteratively). Our system can transform images from extremely low resolutions with severe degradations, for example, highly distorted inputs…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

A Snapshot of Influence: A Local Data Attribution Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025oral

Online reinforcement learning (RL) excels in complex, safety-critical domains but suffers from sample inefficiency, training instability, and limited interpretability. Data attribution provides a principled way to trace model behavior back to training samples, yet existing methods assume fixed datas…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

AutoRedTeamer: Autonomous Red Teaming with Lifelong Attack Integration

NeurIPS 2025poster

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, security and safety evaluation are crucial. While current red teaming approaches have made strides in assessing LLM vulnerabilities, they often rely heavily on human input and lack comprehensive coverage of emerging attack vectors. This pa…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CGBench: Benchmarking Language Model Scientific Reasoning for Clinical Genetics Research

NeurIPS 2025poster

Variant and gene interpretation are fundamental to personalized medicine and translational biomedicine. However, traditional approaches are manual and labor-intensive. Generative language models (LMs) can facilitate this process, accelerating the translation of fundamental research into clinically-a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CHORDS: Diffusion Sampling Accelerator with Multi-core Hierarchical ODE Solvers

ICCV 2025poster

Diffusion-based generative models have become dominant generators of high-fidelity images and videos but remain limited by their computationally expensive inference procedures. Existing acceleration techniques either require extensive model retraining or compromise significantly on sample quality. T…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Capturing the Temporal Dependence of Training Data Influence

ICLR 2025oral

Traditional data influence estimation methods, like influence function, assume that learning algorithms are permutation-invariant with respect to training data. However, modern training paradigms—especially for foundation models using stochastic algorithms and non-convergent, multi-stage curricula—a…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2025

CollabLLM: From Passive Responders to Active Collaborators

ICML 2025oral

Large Language Models are typically trained with next-turn rewards, limiting their ability to optimize for long-term interaction. As a result, they often respond passively to ambiguous or open-ended user requests, failing to help users reach their ultimate intents and leading to inefficient conversa…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Cost-efficient Collaboration between On-device and Cloud Language Models

ICML 2025poster

We investigate an emerging setup in which a small, on-device language model (LM) with access to local data collaborates with a frontier, cloud-hosted LM to solve real-world tasks involving financial, medical, and scientific reasoning over long documents. *Can a local-remote collaboration reduce clo…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Efficient and Asymptotically Unbiased Constrained Decoding for Large Language Models

AISTATS 2025poster

In real-world applications of large language models, outputs are often required to be confined: selecting items from predefined product or document sets, generating phrases that comply with safety standards, or conforming to specialized formatting styles. To control the generation, constrained decod…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

EvoLM: In Search of Lost Language Model Training Dynamics

NeurIPS 2025oral

Modern language model (LM) training has been divided into multiple stages, making it difficult for downstream developers to evaluate the impact of design choices made at each stage. We present EvoLM, a model suite that enables systematic and transparent analysis of LMs' training dynamics across pre-…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

ExGra-Med: Extended Context Graph Alignment for Medical Vision-Language Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

State-of-the-art medical multi-modal LLMs (med-MLLMs), such as LLaVA-Med and BioMedGPT, primarily depend on scaling model size and data volume, with training driven largely by autoregressive objectives. However, we reveal that this approach can lead to weak vision-language alignment, making these mo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

FactTest: Factuality Testing in Large Language Models with Finite-Sample and Distribution-Free Guarantees

ICML 2025poster

The propensity of large language models (LLMs) to generate hallucinations and non-factual content undermines their reliability in high-stakes domains, where rigorous control over Type I errors (the conditional probability of incorrectly classifying hallucinations as truthful content) is essential. D…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

GMValuator: Similarity-based Data Valuation for Generative Models

ICLR 2025poster

Data valuation plays a crucial role in machine learning. Existing data valuation methods, mainly focused on discriminative models, overlook generative models that have gained attention recently. In generative models, data valuation measures the impact of training data on generated datasets. Very few…

2025

GeoAda: Efficiently Finetune Geometric Diffusion Models with Equivariant Adapters

NeurIPS 2025poster

Geometric diffusion models have shown remarkable success in molecular dynamics and structure generation. However, efficiently fine-tuning them for downstream tasks with varying geometric controls remains underexplored. In this work, we propose an SE(3)-equivariant adapter framework (GeoAda) that ena…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Improving Model Alignment Through Collective Intelligence of Open-Source Models

ICML 2025poster

Building helpful and harmless large language models (LLMs) requires effective model alignment approach based on human instructions and feedback, which necessitates high-quality human-labeled data. Constructing such datasets is often expensive and hard to scale, and may face potential limitations on…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

MMed-RAG: Versatile Multimodal RAG System for Medical Vision Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has demonstrated significant potential in healthcare, particularly in disease diagnosis and treatment planning. Recent progress in Medical Large Vision-Language Models (Med-LVLMs) has opened up new possibilities for interactive diagnostic tools. However, these models oft…

2025

MedTrinity-25M: A Large-scale Multimodal Dataset with Multigranular Annotations for Medicine

ICLR 2025poster

This paper introduces MedTrinity-25M, a comprehensive, large-scale multimodal dataset for medicine, covering over 25 million images across 10 modalities with multigranular annotations for more than 65 diseases. These multigranular annotations encompass both global information, such as modality and o…

2025

Mixture-of-Agents Enhances Large Language Model Capabilities

ICLR 2025spotlight

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) demonstrate substantial capabilities in natural language understanding and generation tasks. With the growing number of LLMs, how to harness the collective expertise of multiple LLMs is an exciting open direction. Toward this goal, we propose a new app…

Cited by 90SourcePDFScholar
2025

More Thinking, Less Seeing? Assessing Amplified Hallucination in Multimodal Reasoning Models

NeurIPS 2025poster

Test-time compute has empowered multimodal large language models to generate extended reasoning chains, yielding strong performance on tasks such as multimodal math reasoning. However, we observe that this improved reasoning ability often comes with increased hallucination: as generations become lon…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Protein Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

EMNLP 2025

Protein-specific large language models (ProteinLLMs) are revolutionizing protein science by enabling more efficient protein structure prediction, function annotation, and design. While existing surveys focus on specific aspects or applications, this work provides the first comprehensive overview of

2025

Reducing Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Latent Space Steering

ICLR 2025spotlight

Hallucination poses a challenge to the deployment of large vision-language models (LVLMs) in applications. Unlike in large language models (LLMs), hallucination in LVLMs often arises from misalignments between visual inputs and textual outputs. This paper investigates the underlying mechanisms of ha…

Cited by 67SourcePDFScholar
2025

SiriuS: Self-improving Multi-agent Systems via Bootstrapped Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Multi-agent AI systems powered by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to solve complex tasks. However, these systems often rely on fragile, manually designed prompts and heuristics, making optimization difficult. A key challenge in optimizing multi-agent systems is acquiring suitab…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Solving Inequality Proofs with Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Inequality proving, crucial across diverse scientific and mathematical fields, tests advanced reasoning skills such as discovering tight bounds and strategic theorem application. This makes it a distinct, demanding frontier for large language models (LLMs), offering insights beyond general mathemati…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

metaTextGrad: Automatically optimizing language model optimizers

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in learning algorithms, evaluations, and optimization tasks. Recent studies have shown that using LLM-based optimizers to automatically optimize model prompts, demonstrations, predictions themselves, or other components can significantly enhance the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Accelerating Transformers with Spectrum-Preserving Token Merging

NeurIPS 2024poster

Increasing the throughput of the Transformer architecture, a foundational component used in numerous state-of-the-art models for vision and language tasks (e.g., GPT, LLaVa), is an important problem in machine learning. One recent and effective strategy is to merge token representations within Trans…

2024

Are More LLM Calls All You Need? Towards the Scaling Properties of Compound AI Systems

NeurIPS 2024poster

Many recent state-of-the-art results in language tasks were achieved using compound systems that perform multiple Language Model (LM) calls and aggregate their responses. However, there is little understanding of how the number of LM calls -- e.g., when asking the LM to answer each question multiple…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2024

ArtWhisperer: A Dataset for Characterizing Human-AI Interactions in Artistic Creations

ICML 2024poster

In this work, we investigate how people use text-to-image models to generate desired target images. To study this interaction, we created ArtWhisperer, an online game where users are given a target image and are tasked with iteratively finding a prompt that creates a similar-looking image as the tar…

2024

AvaTaR: Optimizing LLM Agents for Tool Usage via Contrastive Reasoning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities in utilizing external tools and knowledge to boost accuracy and reduce hallucinations. However, developing prompting techniques that enable LLM agents to effectively use these tools and knowledge remains a heuristic and labo…

2024

CARES: A Comprehensive Benchmark of Trustworthiness in Medical Vision Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Artificial intelligence has significantly impacted medical applications, particularly with the advent of Medical Large Vision Language Models (Med-LVLMs), sparking optimism for the future of automated and personalized healthcare. However, the trustworthiness of Med-LVLMs remains unverified, posing s…

2024

ClashEval: Quantifying the tug-of-war between an LLM’s internal prior and external evidence

NeurIPS 2024poster

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) is frequently used to mitigate hallucinations and provide up-to-date knowledge for large language models (LLMs). However, given that document retrieval is an imprecise task and sometimes results in erroneous or even harmful content being presented in context, thi…

2024

DataInf: Efficiently Estimating Data Influence in LoRA-tuned LLMs and Diffusion Models

ICLR 2024poster

Quantifying the impact of training data points is crucial for understanding the outputs of machine learning models and for improving the transparency of the AI pipeline. The influence function is a principled and popular data attribution method, but its computational cost often makes it challenging…

2024

Enhancing Large Vision Language Models with Self-Training on Image Comprehension

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large vision language models (LVLMs) integrate large language models (LLMs) with pre-trained vision encoders, thereby activating the perception capability of the model to understand image inputs for different queries and conduct subsequent reasoning. Improving this capability requires high-quality v…

2024

GraphMETRO: Mitigating Complex Graph Distribution Shifts via Mixture of Aligned Experts

NeurIPS 2024poster

Graph data are inherently complex and heterogeneous, leading to a high natural diversity of distributional shifts. However, it remains unclear how to build machine learning architectures that generalize to the complex distributional shifts naturally occurring in the real world. Here, we develop Grap…

2024

How Well Can LLMs Negotiate? NegotiationArena Platform and Analysis

ICML 2024poster

Negotiation is the basis of social interactions; humans negotiate everything from the price of cars to how to share common resources. With rapidly growing interest in using large language models (LLMs) to act as agents on behalf of human users, such LLM agents would also need to be able to negotiate…

2024

Learning and Forgetting Unsafe Examples in Large Language Models

ICML 2024poster

As the number of large language models (LLMs) released to the public grows, there is a pressing need to understand the safety implications associated with these models learning from third-party custom finetuning data. We explore the behavior of LLMs finetuned on noisy custom data containing unsafe c…

2024

Navigating Dataset Documentations in AI: A Large-Scale Analysis of Dataset Cards on HuggingFace

ICLR 2024poster

Advances in machine learning are closely tied to the creation of datasets. While data documentation is widely recognized as essential to the reliability, reproducibility, and transparency of ML, we lack a systematic empirical understanding of current dataset documentation practices. To shed light on…

2024

Position: TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models

ICML 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) have gained considerable attention for their excellent natural language processing capabilities. Nonetheless, these LLMs present many challenges, particularly in the realm of trustworthiness. This paper introduces TrustLLM, a comprehensive study of trustworthiness in LLM…

Cited by 95SourcePDFScholar
2024

Prospector Heads: Generalized Feature Attribution for Large Models & Data

ICML 2024poster

Feature attribution, the ability to localize regions of the input data that are relevant for classification, is an important capability for ML models in scientific and biomedical domains. Current methods for feature attribution, which rely on "explaining" the predictions of end-to-end classifiers, s…

2024

Rethinking Data Shapley for Data Selection Tasks: Misleads and Merits

ICML 2024oral

Data Shapley provides a principled approach to data valuation and plays a crucial role in data-centric machine learning (ML) research. Data selection is considered a standard application of Data Shapley. However, its data selection performance has shown to be inconsistent across settings in the lite…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2024

STaRK: Benchmarking LLM Retrieval on Textual and Relational Knowledge Bases

NeurIPS 2024poster

Answering real-world complex queries, such as complex product search, often requires accurate retrieval from semi-structured knowledge bases that involve blend of unstructured (e.g., textual descriptions of products) and structured (e.g., entity relations of products) information. However, many prev…

2024

Safety-Tuned LLaMAs: Lessons From Improving the Safety of Large Language Models that Follow Instructions

ICLR 2024poster

Training large language models to follow instructions makes them perform better on a wide range of tasks and generally become more helpful. However, a perfectly helpful model will follow even the most malicious instructions and readily generate harmful content. In this paper, we raise concerns over…

Cited by 172SourcePDFScholar
2024

Scaling Laws for the Value of Individual Data Points in Machine Learning

ICML 2024poster

Recent works have shown that machine learning models improve at a predictable rate with the amount of training data, leading to scaling laws that describe the relationship between error and dataset size. These scaling laws can help determine a model's training dataset, but they take an aggregate vie…

2024

Selecting Large Language Model to Fine-tune via Rectified Scaling Law

ICML 2024poster

The ever-growing ecosystem of LLMs has posed a challenge in selecting the most appropriate pre-trained model to fine-tune amidst a sea of options. Given constrained resources, fine-tuning all models and making selections afterward is unrealistic. In this work, we formulate this resource-constrained…

2024

Simple linear attention language models balance the recall-throughput tradeoff

ICML 2024spotlight

Recent work has shown that attention-based language models excel at "recall", the ability to ground generations in tokens previously seen in context. However, the efficiency of attention-based models is bottle-necked during inference by the KV-cache's aggressive memory consumption. In this work, we…

Cited by 72SourcePDFScholar
2024

SleepFM: Multi-modal Representation Learning for Sleep Across Brain Activity, ECG and Respiratory Signals

ICML 2024poster

Sleep is a complex physiological process evaluated through various modalities recording electrical brain, cardiac, and respiratory activities. We curate a large polysomnography dataset from over 14,000 participants comprising over 100,000 hours of multi-modal sleep recordings. Leveraging this extens…

2024

Stochastic Amortization: A Unified Approach to Accelerate Feature and Data Attribution

NeurIPS 2024poster

Many tasks in explainable machine learning, such as data valuation and feature attribution, perform expensive computation for each data point and are intractable for large datasets. These methods require efficient approximations, and although amortizing the process by learning a network to directly…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

TFG: Unified Training-Free Guidance for Diffusion Models

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Given an unconditional diffusion model and a predictor for a target property of interest (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. Existing methods, though effective in various individual applications…

2024

UniTox: Leveraging LLMs to Curate a Unified Dataset of Drug-Induced Toxicity from FDA Labels

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Drug-induced toxicity is one of the leading reasons new drugs fail clinical trials. Machine learning models that predict drug toxicity from molecular structure could help researchers prioritize less toxic drug candidates. However, current toxicity datasets are typically small and limited to a single…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Zoology: Measuring and Improving Recall in Efficient Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

Attention-free language models that combine gating and convolutions are growing in popularity due to their efficiency and increasingly competitive performance. To better understand these architectures, we pretrain a suite of 17 attention and gated-convolution language models, finding that SoTA gated…

2023

Accuracy on the Curve: On the Nonlinear Correlation of ML Performance Between Data Subpopulations

ICML 2023poster

Understanding the performance of machine learning (ML) models across diverse data distributions is critically important for reliable applications. Despite recent empirical studies positing a near-perfect linear correlation between in-distribution (ID) and out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracies, we emp…

2023

Beyond Confidence: Reliable Models Should Also Consider Atypicality

NeurIPS 2023poster

While most machine learning models can provide confidence in their predictions, confidence is insufficient to understand a prediction's reliability. For instance, the model may have a low confidence prediction if the input is not well-represented in the training dataset or if the input is inherently…

2023

Beyond Positive Scaling: How Negation Impacts Scaling Trends of Language Models

ACL 2023findings

Language models have been shown to exhibit positive scaling, where performance improves as models are scaled up in terms of size, compute, or data. In this work, we introduce NeQA, a dataset consisting of questions with negation in which language models do not exhibit straightforward positive scalin…

2023

Diagnosing and Rectifying Vision Models using Language

ICLR 2023poster

Recent multi-modal contrastive learning models have demonstrated the ability to learn an embedding space suitable for building strong vision classifiers, by leveraging the rich information in large-scale image-caption datasets. Our work highlights a distinct advantage of this multi-modal embedding s…

2023

Discover and Cure: Concept-aware Mitigation of Spurious Correlation

ICML 2023poster

Deep neural networks often rely on spurious correlations to make predictions, which hinders generalization beyond training environments. For instance, models that associate cats with bed backgrounds can fail to predict the existence of cats in other environments without beds. Mitigating spurious cor…

2023

FIFA: Making Fairness More Generalizable in Classifiers Trained on Imbalanced Data

ICLR 2023poster

Algorithmic fairness plays an important role in machine learning and imposing fairness constraints during learning is a common approach. However, many datasets are imbalanced in certain label classes (e.g. "healthy") and sensitive subgroups (e.g. "older patients"). Empirically, this imbalance leads…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2023

Factorized Contrastive Learning: Going Beyond Multi-view Redundancy

NeurIPS 2023poster

In a wide range of multimodal tasks, contrastive learning has become a particularly appealing approach since it can successfully learn representations from abundant unlabeled data with only pairing information (e.g., image-caption or video-audio pairs). Underpinning these approaches is the assumptio…

2023

FaiREE: fair classification with finite-sample and distribution-free guarantee

ICLR 2023poster

Algorithmic fairness plays an increasingly critical role in machine learning research. Several group fairness notions and algorithms have been proposed. However, the fairness guarantee of existing fair classification methods mainly depend on specific data distributional assumptions, often requiring…

2023

Freeze then Train: Towards Provable Representation Learning under Spurious Correlations and Feature Noise

AISTATS 2023poster

The existence of spurious correlations such as image backgrounds in the training environment can make empirical risk minimization (ERM) perform badly in the test environment. To address this problem, Kirichenko et al. (2022) empirically found that the core features that are related to the outcome ca…

2023

HAPI Explorer: Comprehension, Discovery, and Explanation on History of ML APIs

AAAI 2023technical

Machine learning prediction APIs offered by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and many other providers have been continuously adopted in a plethora of applications, such as visual object detection, natural language comprehension, and speech recognition. Despite the importance of a systematic study and comp…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

OpenDataVal: a Unified Benchmark for Data Valuation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Assessing the quality and impact of individual data points is critical for improving model performance and mitigating undesirable biases within the training dataset. Several data valuation algorithms have been proposed to quantify data quality, however, there lacks a systemic and standardized benchm…

2023

Understanding Multimodal Contrastive Learning and Incorporating Unpaired Data

AISTATS 2023poster

Language-supervised vision models have recently attracted great attention in computer vision. A common approach to build such models is to use contrastive learning on paired data across the two modalities, as exemplified by Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP). In this paper, (i) we initia…

2023

When and Why Vision-Language Models Behave like Bags-Of-Words, and What to Do About It?

ICLR 2023top-5%

Despite the success of large vision and language models (VLMs) in many downstream applications, it is unclear how well they encode the compositional relationships between objects and attributes. Here, we create the Attribution, Relation, and Order (ARO) benchmark to systematically evaluate the abili…

2022

Beta Shapley: a Unified and Noise-reduced Data Valuation Framework for Machine Learning

AISTATS 2022poster

Data Shapley has recently been proposed as a principled framework to quantify the contribution of individual datum in machine learning. It can effectively identify helpful or harmful data points for a learning algorithm. In this paper, we propose Beta Shapley, which is a substantial generalization o…

2022

C-Mixup: Improving Generalization in Regression

NeurIPS 2022accept

Improving the generalization of deep networks is an important open challenge, particularly in domains without plentiful data. The mixup algorithm improves generalization by linearly interpolating a pair of examples and their corresponding labels. These interpolated examples augment the original trai…

2022

Domino: Discovering Systematic Errors with Cross-Modal Embeddings

ICLR 2022oral

Machine learning models that achieve high overall accuracy often make systematic errors on important subsets (or slices) of data. Identifying underperforming slices is particularly challenging when working with high-dimensional inputs (e.g. images, audio), where important slices are often unlabeled.…

Cited by 160SourcePDFScholar
2022

Efficient Online ML API Selection for Multi-Label Classification Tasks

ICML 2022spotlight

Multi-label classification tasks such as OCR and multi-object recognition are a major focus of the growing machine learning as a service industry. While many multi-label APIs are available, it is challenging for users to decide which API to use for their own data and budget, due to the heterogeneity…

2022

How Did the Model Change? Efficiently Assessing Machine Learning API Shifts

ICLR 2022poster

ML prediction APIs from providers like Amazon and Google have made it simple to use ML in applications. A challenge for users is that such APIs continuously change over time as the providers update models, and changes can happen silently without users knowing. It is thus important to monitor when an…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar
2022

Improving Out-of-Distribution Robustness via Selective Augmentation

ICML 2022spotlight

Machine learning algorithms typically assume that training and test examples are drawn from the same distribution. However, distribution shift is a common problem in real-world applications and can cause models to perform dramatically worse at test time. In this paper, we specifically consider the p…

2022

MLDemon:Deployment Monitoring for Machine Learning Systems

AISTATS 2022poster

Post-deployment monitoring of ML systems is critical for ensuring reliability, especially as new user inputs can differ from the training distribution. Here we propose a novel approach, MLDemon, for ML DEployment MONitoring. MLDemon integrates both unlabeled data and a small amount of on-demand labe…

2022

Meaningfully debugging model mistakes using conceptual counterfactual explanations

ICML 2022spotlight

Understanding and explaining the mistakes made by trained models is critical to many machine learning objectives, such as improving robustness, addressing concept drift, and mitigating biases. However, this is often an ad hoc process that involves manually looking at the model’s mistakes on many tes…

2022

MetaShift: A Dataset of Datasets for Evaluating Contextual Distribution Shifts and Training Conflicts

ICLR 2022poster

Understanding the performance of machine learning models across diverse data distributions is critically important for reliable applications. Motivated by this, there is a growing focus on curating benchmark datasets that capture distribution shifts. While valuable, the existing benchmarks are limit…

2022

Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2022accept

We present modality gap, an intriguing geometric phenomenon of the representation space of multi-modal models. Specifically, we show that different data modalities (e.g. images and text) are embedded at arm's length in their shared representation in multi-modal models such as CLIP. Our systematic an…

2022

SkinCon: A skin disease dataset densely annotated by domain experts for fine-grained debugging and analysis

NeurIPS 2022accept

For the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in high risk settings, such as healthcare, methods that provide interpretability/explainability or allow fine-grained error analysis are critical. Many recent methods for interpretability/explainability and fine-grained error analysis use concepts,…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2022

Uncalibrated Models Can Improve Human-AI Collaboration

NeurIPS 2022accept

In many practical applications of AI, an AI model is used as a decision aid for human users. The AI provides advice that a human (sometimes) incorporates into their decision-making process. The AI advice is often presented with some measure of "confidence" that the human can use to calibrate how muc…

2021

Adversarial Training Helps Transfer Learning via Better Representations

NeurIPS 2021poster

Transfer learning aims to leverage models pre-trained on source data to efficiently adapt to target setting, where only limited data are available for model fine-tuning. Recent works empirically demonstrate that adversarial training in the source data can improve the ability of models to transfer to…

Cited by 63SourcePDFScholar
2021

Approximate Data Deletion from Machine Learning Models

AISTATS 2021poster

Deleting data from a trained machine learning (ML) model is a critical task in many applications. For example, we may want to remove the influence of training points that might be out of date or outliers. Regulations such as EU’s General Data Protection Regulation also stipulate that individuals can…

2021

Competing AI: How does competition feedback affect machine learning?

AISTATS 2021poster

This papers studies how competition affects machine learning (ML) predictors. As ML becomes more ubiquitous, it is often deployed by companies to compete over customers. For example, digital platforms like Yelp use ML to predict user preference and make recommendations. A service that is more often…

Cited by 21SourcePDFScholar
2021

Efficient Computation and Analysis of Distributional Shapley Values

AISTATS 2021poster

Distributional data Shapley value (DShapley) has recently been proposed as a principled framework to quantify the contribution of individual datum in machine learning. DShapley develops the foundational game theory concept of Shapley values into a statistical framework and can be applied to identify…

2021

How Does Mixup Help With Robustness and Generalization?

ICLR 2021spotlight

Mixup is a popular data augmentation technique based on on convex combinations of pairs of examples and their labels. This simple technique has shown to substantially improve both the model's robustness as well as the generalization of the trained model. However, it is not well-understood why such…

Cited by 313SourcePDFScholar
2021

How to Learn when Data Reacts to Your Model: Performative Gradient Descent

ICML 2021spotlight

Performative distribution shift captures the setting where the choice of which ML model is deployed changes the data distribution. For example, a bank which uses the number of open credit lines to determine a customer’s risk of default on a loan may induce customers to open more credit lines in orde…

Cited by 94SourcePDFScholar
2021

Improving Adversarial Robustness via Unlabeled Out-of-Domain Data

AISTATS 2021poster

Data augmentation by incorporating cheap unlabeled data from multiple domains is a powerful way to improve prediction especially when there is limited labeled data. In this work, we investigate how adversarial robustness can be enhanced by leveraging out-of-domain unlabeled data. We demonstrate that…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2021

Improving Generalization in Meta-learning via Task Augmentation

ICML 2021spotlight

Meta-learning has proven to be a powerful paradigm for transferring the knowledge from previous tasks to facilitate the learning of a novel task. Current dominant algorithms train a well-generalized model initialization which is adapted to each task via the support set. The crux lies in optimizing t…

2019

Concrete Autoencoders: Differentiable Feature Selection and Reconstruction

ICML 2019oral

We introduce the concrete autoencoder, an end-to-end differentiable method for global feature selection, which efficiently identifies a subset of the most informative features and simultaneously learns a neural network to reconstruct the input data from the selected features. Our method is unsupervi…

Cited by 193SourcePDFScholar
2019

Improving the Stability of the Knockoff Procedure: Multiple Simultaneous Knockoffs and Entropy Maximization

AISTATS 2019poster

The Model-X knockoff procedure has recently emerged as a powerful approach for feature selection with statistical guarantees. The advantage of knockoffs is that if we have a good model of the features X, then we can identify salient features without knowing anything about how the outcome Y depends o…

Cited by 54SourcePDFScholar
2019

Knockoffs for the Mass: New Feature Importance Statistics with False Discovery Guarantees

AISTATS 2019poster

An important problem in machine learning and statistics is to identify features that causally affect the outcome. This is often impossible to do from purely observational data, and a natural relaxation is to identify features that are correlated with the outcome even conditioned on all other observe…

Cited by 68SourcePDFScholar
2018

CoVeR: Learning Covariate-Specific Vector Representations with Tensor Decompositions

ICML 2018oral

Word embedding is a useful approach to capture co-occurrence structures in large text corpora. However, in addition to the text data itself, we often have additional covariates associated with individual corpus documents—e.g. the demographic of the author, time and venue of publication—and we would…

2018

Why Adaptively Collected Data Have Negative Bias and How to Correct for It

AISTATS 2018poster

From scientific experiments to online A/B testing, the previously observed data often affects how future experiments are performed, which in turn affects which data will be collected. Such adaptivity introduces complex correlations between the data and the collection procedure. In this paper, we pro…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2017

Learning Latent Space Models with Angular Constraints

ICML 2017poster

The large model capacity of latent space models (LSMs) enables them to achieve great performance on various applications, but meanwhile renders LSMs to be prone to overfitting. Several recent studies investigate a new type of regularization approach, which encourages components in LSMs to be diverse…

Cited by 27SourcePDFScholar
2016

Rich Component Analysis

ICML 2016poster

In many settings, we have multiple data sets (also called views) that capture different and overlapping aspects of the same phenomenon. We are often interested in finding patterns that are unique to one or to a subset of the views. For example, we might have one set of molecular observations and one…

Cited by 19SourcePDFScholar