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Kushal Tirumala

7 accepted papers

2025

CAT: Content-Adaptive Image Tokenization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Most existing image tokenizers encode images into a fixed number of tokens or patches, overlooking the inherent variability in image complexity and introducing unnecessary computate overhead for simpler images. To address this, we propose Content-Adaptive Tokenizer (CAT), which dynamically adjusts…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of the Deeper Layers

ICLR 2025poster

How is knowledge stored in an LLM’s weights? We study this via layer pruning: if removing a certain layer does not affect model performance in common question-answering benchmarks, then the weights in that layer are not necessary for storing the knowledge needed to answer those questions. To find th…

Cited by 90SourcePDFScholar
2025

Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model

ICLR 2025oral

We introduce Transfusion, a recipe for training a multi-modal model over discrete and continuous data. Transfusion combines the language modeling loss function (next token prediction) with diffusion to train a single transformer over mixed-modality sequences. We pretrain multiple Transfusion models…

Cited by 150SourcePDFScholar
2025

When Worse is Better: Navigating the Compression Generation Trade-off In Visual Tokenization

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Current image generation methods are based on a two-stage training approach. In stage 1, an auto-encoder is trained to compress an image into a latent space; in stage 2, a generative model is trained to learn a distribution over that latent space. This reveals a fundamental trade-off, do we compress…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Effective pruning of web-scale datasets based on complexity of concept clusters

ICLR 2024poster

Utilizing massive web-scale datasets has led to unprecedented performance gains in machine learning models, but also imposes outlandish compute requirements for their training. In order to improve training and data efficiency, we here push the limits of pruning large-scale multimodal datasets for tr…

2022

Investigating Generalization by Controlling Normalized Margin

ICML 2022spotlight

Weight norm $\|w\|$ and margin $\gamma$ participate in learning theory via the normalized margin $\gamma/\|w\|$. Since standard neural net optimizers do not control normalized margin, it is hard to test whether this quantity causally relates to generalization. This paper designs a series of experime…

2022

Memorization Without Overfitting: Analyzing the Training Dynamics of Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2022accept

Despite their wide adoption, the underlying training and memorization dynamics of very large language models is not well understood. We empirically study exact memorization in causal and masked language modeling, across model sizes and throughout the training process. We measure the effects of datas…

Cited by 278SourcePDFScholar