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Michael Aerni

5 accepted papers

2026

Modal Aphasia: Can Unified Multimodal Models Describe Images From Memory?

ICLR 2026poster

We present *modal aphasia*, a systematic dissociation in which current unified multimodal models accurately memorize concepts visually but fail to articulate them in writing, despite being trained on images and text simultaneously. For one, we show that leading frontier models can generate near-perf…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2026

OptiFluence: Principled Design of Privacy Canaries

ICML 2026poster

Privacy auditing has emerged as a practical tool for empirically estimating training data leakage in machine learning models, in contrast to the provable but often overly pessimistic bounds provided by differential privacy analysis. A common strategy is to use membership inference attacks to detect …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Measuring Non-Adversarial Reproduction of Training Data in Large Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models memorize parts of their training data. Memorizing short snippets and facts is required to answer questions about the world and to be fluent in any language. But models have also been shown to reproduce long verbatim sequences of memorized text when prompted by a motivated adver…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2023

Strong inductive biases provably prevent harmless interpolation

ICLR 2023poster

Classical wisdom suggests that estimators should avoid fitting noise to achieve good generalization. In contrast, modern overparameterized models can yield small test error despite interpolating noise — a phenomenon often called "benign overfitting" or "harmless interpolation". This paper argues tha…

2021

Interpolation can hurt robust generalization even when there is no noise

NeurIPS 2021poster

Numerous recent works show that overparameterization implicitly reduces variance for min-norm interpolators and max-margin classifiers. These findings suggest that ridge regularization has vanishing benefits in high dimensions. We challenge this narrative by showing that, even in the absence of noi…