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John Kirchenbauer

14 accepted papers

2026

A Fictional Q&A Dataset for Studying Memorization and Knowledge Acquisition

ICLR 2026poster

When language models are trained on textual data, they acquire both knowledge about the structure of language as well as knowledge of facts about the world. At inference time, their knowledge of facts can be leveraged to solve interesting problems and perform useful knowledge work for users. It is w…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

Antidistillation Fingerprinting

ICML 2026poster

Model distillation enables efficient emulation of frontier large language models (LLMs), creating a need for robust mechanisms to detect when a third-party student model has trained on a teacher model's outputs. However, existing fingerprinting techniques that could be used to detect such distillati…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Gemstones: A Model Suite for Multi-Faceted Scaling Laws

NeurIPS 2025poster

Scaling laws are typically fit using a family of models with a narrow range of frozen hyperparameter choices. In this work we study scaling laws using multiple architectural shapes and hyperparameter choices, highlighting their impact on resulting prescriptions. As a primary artifact of our researc…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

We study a novel language model architecture that is capable of scaling test-time computation by implicitly reasoning in latent space. Our model works by iterating a recurrent block, thereby unrolling to arbitrary depth at test-time. This stands in contrast to mainstream reasoning models that scale…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on enormous quantities of unlicensed text, a practice that has led to scrutiny due to possible intellectual property infringement and ethical concerns. Training LLMs on openly licensed text presents a first step towards addressing these issues, but…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Zero-Shot Vision Encoder Grafting via LLM Surrogates

ICCV 2025poster

Vision language models (VLMs) typically pair a modestly sized vision encoder with a large language model (LLM), e.g., Llama-70B, making the decoder the primary computational burden during training.To reduce costs, a promising strategy is to first train the vision encoder using a small language model…

2024

Be like a Goldfish, Don't Memorize! Mitigating Memorization in Generative LLMs

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models can memorize and repeat their training data, causing privacy and copyright risks. To mitigate memorization, we introduce a subtle modification to the next-token training objective that we call the goldfish loss. During training, a randomly sampled subsets of tokens are excluded…

2024

NEFTune: Noisy Embeddings Improve Instruction Finetuning

ICLR 2024poster

We show that language model finetuning can be improved, sometimes dramatically, with a simple augmentation. NEFTune adds noise to the embedding vectors during training. Standard finetuning of LLaMA-2-7B using Alpaca achieves $29.79$\% on AlpacaEval, which rises to $64.69$\% using noisy embeddings.…

2024

On the Reliability of Watermarks for Large Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

As LLMs become commonplace, machine-generated text has the potential to flood the internet with spam, social media bots, and valueless content. _Watermarking_ is a simple and effective strategy for mitigating such harms by enabling the detection and documentation of LLM-generated text. Yet a crucial…

2024

Transformers Can Do Arithmetic with the Right Embeddings

NeurIPS 2024poster

The poor performance of transformers on arithmetic tasks seems to stem in large part from their inability to keep track of the exact position of each digit inside of a large span of digits. We mend this problem by adding an embedding to each digit that encodes its position relative to the start of t…

2023

A Watermark for Large Language Models

ICML 2023oral

Potential harms of large language models can be mitigated by watermarking model output, i.e., embedding signals into generated text that are invisible to humans but algorithmically detectable from a short span of tokens. We propose a watermarking framework for proprietary language models. The waterm…

2023

GOAT: A Global Transformer on Large-scale Graphs

ICML 2023poster

Graph transformers have been competitive on graph classification tasks, but they fail to outperform Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) on node classification, which is a common task performed on large-scale graphs for industrial applications. Meanwhile, existing GNN architectures are limited in their abil…

Cited by 67SourcePDFScholar
2023

Hard Prompts Made Easy: Gradient-Based Discrete Optimization for Prompt Tuning and Discovery

NeurIPS 2023poster

The strength of modern generative models lies in their ability to be controlled through prompts. Hard prompts comprise interpretable words and tokens, and are typically hand-crafted by humans. Soft prompts, on the other hand, consist of continuous feature vectors. These can be discovered using pow…

2023

Tree-Rings Watermarks: Invisible Fingerprints for Diffusion Images

NeurIPS 2023poster

Watermarking the outputs of generative models is a crucial technique for tracing copyright and preventing potential harm from AI-generated content. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique called Tree-Ring Watermarking that robustly fingerprints diffusion model outputs. Unlike existing methods…

Cited by 60SourcePDFScholar