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Max Zimmer

15 accepted papers

2026

From Associations to Activations: Comparing Behavioral and Hidden-State Semantic Geometry in LLMs

ICML 2026poster

We investigate the extent to which an LLM’s hidden-state geometry can be recovered from its behavior in psycholinguistic experiments. Across eight instruction-tuned transformer models, we run two experimental paradigms---similarity-based forced choice and free association---over a shared 5,000-word …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Lower Bounds for Frank-Wolfe on Strongly Convex Sets

ICML 2026poster

We present a constructive lower bound of $\Omega(1/\sqrt{\varepsilon})$ for Frank-Wolfe (FW) when both the objective and the constraint set are smooth and strongly convex, showing that the known uniform $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{\varepsilon})$ guarantees in this regime are tight. It is known that under a…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Neural Sum-of-Squares: Certifying the Nonnegativity of Polynomials with Transformers

ICLR 2026poster

Certifying nonnegativity of polynomials is a well-known NP-hard problem with direct applications spanning non-convex optimization, control, robotics, and beyond. A sufficient condition for nonnegativity is the Sum-of-Squares property, i.e., it can be written as a sum of squares of other polynomials.…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

RECON: Robust symmetry discovery via Explicit Canonical Orientation Normalization

ICLR 2026poster

Real world data often exhibits unknown, instance-specific symmetries that rarely exactly match a transformation group $G$ fixed a priori. Class-pose decompositions aim to create disentangled representations by factoring inputs into invariant features and a pose $g\in G$ defined relative to a trainin…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

When Does Sparsity Mitigate the Curse of Depth in LLMs

ICML 2026poster

Recent work has demonstrated the curse of depth in large language models (LLMs), where later layers contribute less to learning and representation than earlier layers. Such under-utilization is linked to the accumulated growth of variance in Pre-Layer Normalization, which can push deep blocks toward…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Approximating Latent Manifolds in Neural Networks via Vanishing Ideals

ICML 2025poster

Deep neural networks have reshaped modern machine learning by learning powerful latent representations that often align with the manifold hypothesis: high-dimensional data lie on lower-dimensional manifolds. In this paper, we establish a connection between manifold learning and computational algebra…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Capturing Temporal Dynamics in Large-Scale Canopy Tree Height Estimation

ICML 2025poster

With the rise in global greenhouse gas emissions, accurate large-scale tree canopy height maps are essential for understanding forest structure, estimating above-ground biomass, and monitoring ecological disruptions. To this end, we present a novel approach to generate large-scale, high-resolution c…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Computational Algebra with Attention: Transformer Oracles for Border Basis Algorithms

NeurIPS 2025poster

Solving systems of polynomial equations, particularly those with finitely many solutions, is a crucial challenge across many scientific fields. Traditional methods like Gröbner and Border bases are fundamental but suffer from high computational costs, which have motivated recent Deep Learning approa…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

DUNIA: Pixel-Sized Embeddings via Cross-Modal Alignment for Earth Observation Applications

ICML 2025poster

Significant efforts have been directed towards adapting self-supervised multimodal learning for Earth observation applications. However, most current methods produce coarse patch-sized embeddings, limiting their effectiveness and integration with other modalities like LiDAR. To close this gap, we pr…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Neural Discovery in Mathematics: Do Machines Dream of Colored Planes?

ICML 2025oral

We demonstrate how neural networks can drive mathematical discovery through a case study of the Hadwiger-Nelson problem, a long-standing open problem at the intersection of discrete geometry and extremal combinatorics that is concerned with coloring the plane while avoiding monochromatic unit-distan…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

On the Byzantine-Resilience of Distillation-Based Federated Learning

ICLR 2025poster

Federated Learning (FL) algorithms using Knowledge Distillation (KD) have received increasing attention due to their favorable properties with respect to privacy, non-i.i.d. data and communication cost. These methods depart from transmitting model parameters and instead communicate information about…

2024

Estimating Canopy Height at Scale

ICML 2024poster

We propose a framework for global-scale canopy height estimation based on satellite data. Our model leverages advanced data preprocessing techniques, resorts to a novel loss function designed to counter geolocation inaccuracies inherent in the ground-truth height measurements, and employs data from…

2024

Interpretability Guarantees with Merlin-Arthur Classifiers

AISTATS 2024poster

We propose an interactive multi-agent classifier that provides provable interpretability guarantees even for complex agents such as neural networks. These guarantees consist of lower bounds on the mutual information between selected features and the classification decision. Our results are inspired…

2024

Sparse Model Soups: A Recipe for Improved Pruning via Model Averaging

ICLR 2024poster

Neural networks can be significantly compressed by pruning, yielding sparse models with reduced storage and computational demands while preserving predictive performance. Model soups (Wortsman et al., 2022) enhance generalization and out-of-distribution (OOD) performance by averaging the parameters…