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Meghdad Kurmanji

8 accepted papers

2026

DES-LOC: Desynced Low Communication Adaptive Optimizers for Foundation Models

ICLR 2026poster

Scaling foundation model training with Distributed Data Parallel~(DDP) methods is bandwidth-limited. Existing infrequent communication methods like Local SGD were designed to synchronize model parameters only and cannot be trivially applied to adaptive optimizers due to additional optimizer states.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Editing as Unlearning: Are Knowledge Editing Methods Strong Baselines for Large Language Model Unlearning?

AAAI 2026technical

Large language Model (LLM) unlearning, i.e., selectively removing information from LLMs, is vital for responsible model deployment. Differently, LLM knowledge editing aims to modify LLM knowledge instead of removing it. Though editing and unlearning seem to be two distinct tasks, we find there is a

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

MT-DAO: Multi-Timescale Distributed Adaptive Optimizers with Local Updates

ICLR 2026poster

Training large models with distributed data parallelism (DDP) requires frequent communication of gradients across workers, which can saturate bandwidth. Infrequent communication strategies (e.g., Local SGD) reduce this overhead but, when applied to adaptive optimizers, often suffer a performance gap…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

DEPT: Decoupled Embeddings for Pre-training Language Models

ICLR 2025oral

Language Model pre-training uses broad data mixtures to enhance performance across domains and languages. However, training on such heterogeneous text corpora requires extensive and expensive efforts. Since these data sources vary significantly in lexical, syntactic, and semantic aspects, they cause…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2025

LLM Unlearning via Neural Activation Redirection

NeurIPS 2025poster

The ability to selectively remove knowledge from LLMs is highly desirable. However, existing methods often struggle with balancing unlearning efficacy and retain model utility, and lack controllability at inference time to emulate base model behavior as if it had never seen the unlearned data. In th…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Position: Bridge the Gaps between Machine Unlearning and AI Regulation

NeurIPS 2025oral

The "right to be forgotten" and the data privacy laws that encode it have motivated machine unlearning since its earliest days. Now, some argue that an inbound wave of artificial intelligence regulations — like the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act (AIA) — may offer important new use case…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

What makes unlearning hard and what to do about it

NeurIPS 2024poster

Machine unlearning is the problem of removing the effect of a subset of training data (the ``forget set'') from a trained model without damaging the model's utility e.g. to comply with users' requests to delete their data, or remove mislabeled, poisoned or otherwise problematic data. With unlearning…

2023

Towards Unbounded Machine Unlearning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Deep machine unlearning is the problem of 'removing' from a trained neural network a subset of its training set. This problem is very timely and has many applications, including the key tasks of removing biases (RB), resolving confusion (RC) (caused by mislabelled data in trained models), as well as…