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Mark Niklas Mueller

19 accepted papers

2025

Automated Benchmark Generation for Repository-Level Coding Tasks

ICML 2025poster

Code Agent development is an extremely active research area, where a reliable performance metric is critical for tracking progress and guiding new developments. This demand is underscored by the meteoric rise in popularity of SWE-Bench -- a benchmark that challenges code agents to generate patches a…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Average Certified Radius is a Poor Metric for Randomized Smoothing

ICML 2025poster

Randomized smoothing (RS) is popular for providing certified robustness guarantees against adversarial attacks. The average certified radius (ACR) has emerged as a widely used metric for tracking progress in RS. However, in this work, for the first time we show that ACR is a poor metric for evaluati…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

Certification for Differentially Private Prediction in Gradient-Based Training

ICML 2025poster

We study private prediction where differential privacy is achieved by adding noise to the outputs of a non-private model. Existing methods rely on noise proportional to the global sensitivity of the model, often resulting in sub-optimal privacy-utility trade-offs compared to private training. We int…

2024

ConStat: Performance-Based Contamination Detection in Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Public benchmarks play an essential role in the evaluation of large language models. However, data contamination can lead to inflated performance, rendering them unreliable for model comparison. It is therefore crucial to detect contamination and estimate its impact on measured performance. Unfortu…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

DAGER: Exact Gradient Inversion for Large Language Models

NeurIPS 2024poster

Federated learning works by aggregating locally computed gradients from multiple clients, thus enabling collaborative training without sharing private client data. However, prior work has shown that the data can actually be recovered by the server using so-called gradient inversion attacks. While th…

2024

Expressivity of ReLU-Networks under Convex Relaxations

ICLR 2024poster

Convex relaxations are a key component of training and certifying provably safe neural networks. However, despite substantial progress, a wide and poorly understood accuracy gap to standard networks remains, raising the question of whether this is due to fundamental limitations of convex relaxations…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2024

Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Language Transfer via Model Merging

EMNLP 2024finding

As open-weight large language models (LLMs) achieve ever more impressive performance across a wide range of tasks in English, practitioners aim to adapt these models to different languages. However, such language adaptation is often accompanied by catastrophic forgetting of the base model’s capabili…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Prompt Sketching for Large Language Models

ICML 2024poster

Many recent prompting strategies for large language models (LLMs) query the model multiple times sequentially -- first to produce intermediate results and then the final answer. However, using these methods, both decoder and model are unaware of potential follow-up prompts, leading to disconnected a…

2024

SPEAR: Exact Gradient Inversion of Batches in Federated Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Federated learning is a framework for collaborative machine learning where clients only share gradient updates and not their private data with a server. However, it was recently shown that gradient inversion attacks can reconstruct this data from the shared gradients. In the important honest-but-cur…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

SWT-Bench: Testing and Validating Real-World Bug-Fixes with Code Agents

NeurIPS 2024poster

Rigorous software testing is crucial for developing and maintaining high-quality code, making automated test generation a promising avenue for both improving software quality and boosting the effectiveness of code generation methods. However, while code generation with Large Language Models (LLMs) i…

2024

Understanding Certified Training with Interval Bound Propagation

ICLR 2024poster

As robustness verification methods are becoming more precise, training certifiably robust neural networks is becoming ever more relevant. To this end, certified training methods compute and then optimize an upper bound on the worst-case loss over a robustness specification. Curiously, training metho…

2023

Automated Classification of Model Errors on ImageNet

NeurIPS 2023poster

While the ImageNet dataset has been driving computer vision research over the past decade, significant label noise and ambiguity have made top-1 accuracy an insufficient measure of further progress. To address this, new label-sets and evaluation protocols have been proposed for ImageNet showing that…

2023

Certified Training: Small Boxes are All You Need

ICLR 2023top-25%

To obtain, deterministic guarantees of adversarial robustness, specialized training methods are used. We propose, SABR, a novel such certified training method, based on the key insight that propagating interval bounds for a small but carefully selected subset of the adversarial input region is suffi…

2023

Connecting Certified and Adversarial Training

NeurIPS 2023poster

Training certifiably robust neural networks remains a notoriously hard problem. While adversarial training optimizes under-approximations of the worst-case loss, which leads to insufficient regularization for certification, sound certified training methods, optimize loose over-approximations, leadin…

2023

Efficient Certified Training and Robustness Verification of Neural ODEs

ICLR 2023poster

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) are a novel neural architecture, built around initial value problems with learned dynamics which are solved during inference. Thought to be inherently more robust against adversarial perturbations, they were recently shown to be vulnerable to strong adv…

2022

(De-)Randomized Smoothing for Decision Stump Ensembles

NeurIPS 2022accept

Tree-based models are used in many high-stakes application domains such as finance and medicine, where robustness and interpretability are of utmost importance. Yet, methods for improving and certifying their robustness are severely under-explored, in contrast to those focusing on neural networks. Ta…

2022

Boosting Randomized Smoothing with Variance Reduced Classifiers

ICLR 2022spotlight

Randomized Smoothing (RS) is a promising method for obtaining robustness certificates by evaluating a base model under noise. In this work, we: (i) theoretically motivate why ensembles are a particularly suitable choice as base models for RS, and (ii) empirically confirm this choice, obtaining state-o…

2022

Complete Verification via Multi-Neuron Relaxation Guided Branch-and-Bound

ICLR 2022poster

State-of-the-art neural network verifiers are fundamentally based on one of two paradigms: either encoding the whole verification problem via tight multi-neuron convex relaxations or applying a Branch-and-Bound (BaB) procedure leveraging imprecise but fast bounding methods on a large number of easie…

2021

Certify or Predict: Boosting Certified Robustness with Compositional Architectures

ICLR 2021poster

A core challenge with existing certified defense mechanisms is that while they improve certified robustness, they also tend to drastically decrease natural accuracy, making it difficult to use these methods in practice. In this work, we propose a new architecture which addresses this challenge and e…

Cited by 17SourcePDFScholar