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Marc Anton Finzi

18 accepted papers

2025

Antidistillation Sampling

NeurIPS 2025poster

Frontier models that generate extended reasoning traces inadvertently produce token sequences that can facilitate model distillation. Recognizing this vulnerability, model owners may seek sampling strategies that limit the effectiveness of distillation without compromising model performance. *Antidi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Compute-Optimal LLMs Provably Generalize Better with Scale

ICLR 2025poster

Why do larger language models generalize better? To explore this question, we develop generalization bounds on the pretraining objective of large language models (LLMs) in the compute-optimal regime, as described by the Chinchilla scaling laws. We introduce a novel, fully empirical Freedman-type mar…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Predicting the Performance of Black-box Language Models with Follow-up Queries

NeurIPS 2025poster

Reliably predicting the behavior of language models---such as whether their outputs are correct or have been adversarially manipulated---is a fundamentally challenging task. This is often made even more difficult as frontier language models are offered only through closed-source APIs, providing only…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Compute Better Spent: Replacing Dense Layers with Structured Matrices

ICML 2024poster

Dense linear layers are the dominant computational bottleneck in foundation models. Identifying more efficient alternatives to dense matrices has enormous potential for building more compute-efficient models, as exemplified by the success of convolutional networks in the image domain. In this work,…

2024

Non-Vacuous Generalization Bounds for Large Language Models

ICML 2024poster

Modern language models can contain billions of parameters, raising the question of whether they can generalize beyond the training data or simply parrot their training corpora. We provide the first non-vacuous generalization bounds for pretrained large language models (LLMs), indicating that languag…

2024

Position: The No Free Lunch Theorem, Kolmogorov Complexity, and the Role of Inductive Biases in Machine Learning

ICML 2024spotlight

No free lunch theorems for supervised learning state that no learner can solve all problems or that all learners achieve exactly the same accuracy on average over a uniform distribution on learning problems. Accordingly, these theorems are often referenced in support of the notion that individual pr…

Cited by 39SourcePDFScholar
2024

Searching for Efficient Linear Layers over a Continuous Space of Structured Matrices

NeurIPS 2024poster

Dense linear layers are the dominant computational bottleneck in large neural networks, presenting a critical need for more efficient alternatives. Previous efforts to develop alternatives have focused on a small number of hand-crafted structured matrices, and have neglected to investigate whether t…

2024

Unlocking Tokens as Data Points for Generalization Bounds on Larger Language Models

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters excel at predicting the next token in a sequence. Recent work computes non-vacuous compression-based generalization bounds for LLMs, but these bounds are vacuous for large models at the billion-parameter scale. Moreover, these bounds are obtai…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2023

A Stable and Scalable Method for Solving Initial Value PDEs with Neural Networks

ICLR 2023poster

Unlike conventional grid and mesh based methods for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), neural networks have the potential to break the curse of dimensionality, providing approximate solutions to problems where using classical solvers is difficult or impossible. While global minimization…

2023

CoLA: Exploiting Compositional Structure for Automatic and Efficient Numerical Linear Algebra

NeurIPS 2023poster

Many areas of machine learning and science involve large linear algebra problems, such as eigendecompositions, solving linear systems, computing matrix exponentials, and trace estimation. The matrices involved often have Kronecker, convolutional, block diagonal, sum, or product structure. In this pa…

2023

Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasters

NeurIPS 2023poster

By encoding time series as a string of numerical digits, we can frame time series forecasting as next-token prediction in text. Developing this approach, we find that large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3 and LLaMA-2 can surprisingly zero-shot extrapolate time series at a level comparable to or…

2023

The Lie Derivative for Measuring Learned Equivariance

ICLR 2023top-5%

Equivariance guarantees that a model's predictions capture key symmetries in data. When an image is translated or rotated, an equivariant model's representation of that image will translate or rotate accordingly. The success of convolutional neural networks has historically been tied to translation…

2023

User-defined Event Sampling and Uncertainty Quantification in Diffusion Models for Physical Dynamical Systems

ICML 2023poster

Diffusion models are a class of probabilistic generative models that have been widely used as a prior for image processing tasks like text conditional generation and inpainting. We demonstrate that these models can be adapted to make predictions and provide uncertainty quantification for chaotic dyn…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2022

Deconstructing the Inductive Biases of Hamiltonian Neural Networks

ICLR 2022spotlight

Physics-inspired neural networks (NNs), such as Hamiltonian or Lagrangian NNs, dramatically outperform other learned dynamics models by leveraging strong inductive biases. These models, however, are challenging to apply to many real world systems, such as those that don’t conserve energy or contain…

2022

PAC-Bayes Compression Bounds So Tight That They Can Explain Generalization

NeurIPS 2022accept

While there has been progress in developing non-vacuous generalization bounds for deep neural networks, these bounds tend to be uninformative about why deep learning works. In this paper, we develop a compression approach based on quantizing neural network parameters in a linear subspace, profoundly…

2021

Residual Pathway Priors for Soft Equivariance Constraints

NeurIPS 2021poster

Models such as convolutional neural networks restrict the hypothesis space to a set of functions satisfying equivariance constraints, and improve generalization in problems by capturing relevant symmetries. However, symmetries are often only partially respected, preventing models with restriction bi…