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Mark Ibrahim

20 accepted papers

2026

OpenApps: Simulating Environment Variations to Measure UI Agent Reliability

ICLR 2026oral

Reliability is key to realizing the promise of autonomous UI-agents, multimodal agents that directly interact with the apps humans use, as users must be able to trust an agent to complete a given task. Current evaluations rely on fixed environments---often clones of existing apps--- which are limite…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

$\mathbb{X}$-Sample Contrastive Loss: Improving Contrastive Learning with Sample Similarity Graphs

ICLR 2025poster

Learning good representations involves capturing the diverse ways in which data samples relate. Contrastive loss—an objective matching related samples—underlies methods from self-supervised to multimodal learning. Contrastive losses, however, can be viewed more broadly as modifying a similarity grap…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

AbstentionBench: Reasoning LLMs Fail on Unanswerable Questions

NeurIPS 2025poster

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed in both everyday and high-stakes domains, knowing when not to answer is equally critical as answering correctly. Real-world user queries, which can be underspecified, ill-posed, or fundamentally unanswerable, require LLMs to reason about uncer…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Joint‑Embedding vs Reconstruction: Provable Benefits of Latent Space Prediction for Self‑Supervised Learning

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Reconstruction and joint-embedding have emerged as two leading paradigms in Self‑Supervised Learning (SSL). Reconstruction methods focus on recovering the original sample from a different view in input space. On the other hand, joint-embedding methods align the representations of different views in…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Rethinking the Role of Verbatim Memorization in LLM Privacy

NeurIPS 2025poster

Conventional wisdom in machine learning privacy research states that memorization directly implies a loss of privacy. In contrast, a well-generalized model only remembers distributional patterns and preserves privacy of its training data. In this work, we show that this relationship is much more c…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

What’s in Common? Multimodal Models Hallucinate When Reasoning Across Scenes

NeurIPS 2025poster

Multimodal language models possess a remarkable ability to handle an open-vocabulary worth of objects. Yet the best models still suffer from hallucinations when reasoning about scenes in the real world, revealing a gap between their seemingly strong performance on existing perception benchmarks that…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Discovering Environments with XRM

ICML 2024oral

Environment annotations are essential for the success of many out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization methods. Unfortunately, these are costly to obtain and often limited by human annotators' biases. To achieve robust generalization, it is essential to develop algorithms for automatic environment d…

2024

Does Progress On Object Recognition Benchmarks Improve Generalization on Crowdsourced, Global Data?

ICLR 2024poster

For more than a decade, researchers have measured progress in object recognition on the ImageNet dataset along with its associated generalization benchmarks such as ImageNet-A, -C, and -R. Recent advances in foundation models, trained on orders of magnitude more data, have begun to saturate performa…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Modeling Caption Diversity in Contrastive Vision-Language Pretraining

ICML 2024poster

There are a thousand ways to caption an image. Contrastive Language Pretraining (CLIP) on the other hand, works by mapping an image and its caption to a single vector -- limiting how well CLIP-like models can represent the diverse ways to describe an image. In this work, we introduce Llip, Latent La…

2024

The Factorization Curse: Which Tokens You Predict Underlie the Reversal Curse and More

NeurIPS 2024poster

Today's best language models still struggle with "hallucinations", factually incorrect generations, which impede their ability to reliably retrieve information seen during training. The *reversal curse*, where models cannot recall information when probed in a different order than was encountered dur…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

UniBench: Visual Reasoning Requires Rethinking Vision-Language Beyond Scaling

NeurIPS 2024poster

Significant research efforts have been made to scale and improve vision-language model (VLM) training approaches. Yet, with an ever-growing number of benchmarks, researchers are tasked with the heavy burden of implementing each protocol, bearing a non-trivial computational cost, and making sense of…

2023

A Whac-a-Mole Dilemma: Shortcuts Come in Multiples Where Mitigating One Amplifies Others

CVPR 2023poster

Machine learning models have been found to learn shortcuts---unintended decision rules that are unable to generalize---undermining models' reliability. Previous works address this problem under the tenuous assumption that only a single shortcut exists in the training data. Real-world images are rife…

2023

Battle of the Backbones: A Large-Scale Comparison of Pretrained Models across Computer Vision Tasks

NeurIPS 2023poster

Neural network based computer vision systems are typically built on a backbone, a pretrained or randomly initialized feature extractor. Several years ago, the default option was an ImageNet-trained convolutional neural network. However, the recent past has seen the emergence of countless backbones…

2023

Disentanglement of Correlated Factors via Hausdorff Factorized Support

ICLR 2023poster

A grand goal in deep learning research is to learn representations capable of generalizing across distribution shifts. Disentanglement is one promising direction aimed at aligning a model's representation with the underlying factors generating the data (e.g. color or background). Existing disentangl…

2023

Exploring Why Object Recognition Performance Degrades Across Income Levels and Geographies with Factor Annotations

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Despite impressive advances in object-recognition, deep learning systems’ performance degrades significantly across geographies and lower income levels---raising pressing concerns of inequity. Addressing such performance gaps remains a challenge, as little is understood about why performance degrade…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

ImageNet-X: Understanding Model Mistakes with Factor of Variation Annotations

ICLR 2023top-25%

Deep learning vision systems are widely deployed across applications where reliability is critical. However, even today's best models can fail to recognize an object when its pose, lighting, or background varies. While existing benchmarks surface examples challenging for models, they do not explain…

Cited by 50SourcePDFScholar
2023

PUG: Photorealistic and Semantically Controllable Synthetic Data for Representation Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Synthetic image datasets offer unmatched advantages for designing and evaluating deep neural networks: they make it possible to (i) render as many data samples as needed, (ii) precisely control each scene and yield granular ground truth labels (and captions), (iii) precisely control distribution shi…

2023

Understanding the detrimental class-level effects of data augmentation

NeurIPS 2023poster

Data augmentation (DA) encodes invariance and provides implicit regularization critical to a model's performance in image classification tasks. However, while DA improves average accuracy, recent studies have shown that its impact can be highly class dependent: achieving optimal average accuracy com…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2021

CrypTen: Secure Multi-Party Computation Meets Machine Learning

NeurIPS 2021poster

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows parties to perform computations on data while keeping that data private. This capability has great potential for machine-learning applications: it facilitates training of machine-learning models on private data sets owned by different parties, evaluation o…

Cited by 456SourcePDFScholar
2021

Grounding inductive biases in natural images: invariance stems from variations in data

NeurIPS 2021poster

To perform well on unseen and potentially out-of-distribution samples, it is desirable for machine learning models to have a predictable response with respect to transformations affecting the factors of variation of the input. Here, we study the relative importance of several types of inductive bias…