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Mahdi Haghifam

9 accepted papers

2025

Model AI Assignments 2025

AAAI 2025technical

The Model AI Assignments session seeks to gather and disseminate the best assignment designs of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Education community. Recognizing that assignments form the core of student learning experience, we here present abstracts of thirteen AI assignments from the 2025 session…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

On Traceability in $\ell_p$ Stochastic Convex Optimization

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

In this paper, we investigate the necessity of traceability for accurate learning in stochastic convex optimization (SCO) under $\ell_p$ geometries. Informally, we say a learning algorithm is \emph{$m$-traceable} if, by analyzing its output, it is possible to identify at least $m$ of its training sa…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Information Complexity of Stochastic Convex Optimization: Applications to Generalization, Memorization, and Tracing

ICML 2024oral

In this work, we investigate the interplay between memorization and learning in the context of *stochastic convex optimization* (SCO). We define memorization via the information a learning algorithm reveals about its training data points. We then quantify this information using the framework of cond…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Faster Differentially Private Convex Optimization via Second-Order Methods

NeurIPS 2023poster

Differentially private (stochastic) gradient descent is the workhorse of DP private machine learning in both the convex and non-convex settings. Without privacy constraints, second-order methods, like Newton's method, converge faster than first-order methods like gradient descent. In this work, we i…

Cited by 15SourcePDFScholar
2023

Why Is Public Pretraining Necessary for Private Model Training?

ICML 2023poster

In the privacy-utility tradeoff of a model trained on benchmark language and vision tasks, remarkable improvements have been widely reported when the model is pretrained on public data. Some gain is expected as these models inherit the benefits of transfer learning, which is the standard motivation…

Cited by 51SourcePDFScholar
2021

Towards a Unified Information-Theoretic Framework for Generalization

NeurIPS 2021spotlight

In this work, we investigate the expressiveness of the "conditional mutual information" (CMI) framework of Steinke and Zakynthinou (2020) and the prospect of using it to provide a unified framework for proving generalization bounds in the realizable setting. We first demonstrate that one can use…

Cited by 45SourcePDFScholar
2020

Sharpened Generalization Bounds based on Conditional Mutual Information and an Application to Noisy, Iterative Algorithms

NeurIPS 2020poster

The information-theoretic framework of Russo and Zou (2016) and Xu and Raginsky (2017) provides bounds on the generalization error of a learning algorithm in terms of the mutual information between the algorithm's output and the training sample. In this work, we study the proposal, by Steinke and Za…

Cited by 125SourcePDFScholar
2019

Information-Theoretic Generalization Bounds for SGLD via Data-Dependent Estimates

NeurIPS 2019poster

In this work, we improve upon the stepwise analysis of noisy iterative learning algorithms initiated by Pensia, Jog, and Loh (2018) and recently extended by Bu, Zou, and Veeravalli (2019). Our main contributions are significantly improved mutual information bounds for Stochastic Gradient Langevin Dy…