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Muhammad Bilal Zafar

8 accepted papers

2026

Rote Learning Considered Useful: Generalizing over Memorized Data in LLMs

ICLR 2026poster

Rote learning is a memorization technique based on repetition. Many researchers argue that rote learning hinders generalization because it encourages verbatim memorization rather than deeper understanding. This concern extends even to factual knowledge, which inevitably requires a certain degree of…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

The Impact of Inference Acceleration on Bias of LLMs

NAACL 2025long

Last few years have seen unprecedented advances in capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). These advancements promise to benefit a vast array of application domains. However, due to their immense size, performing inference with LLMs is both costly and slow. Consequently, a plethora of recent w…

2023

Efficient fair PCA for fair representation learning

AISTATS 2023poster

We revisit the problem of fair principal component analysis (PCA), where the goal is to learn the best low-rank linear approximation of the data that obfuscates demographic information. We propose a conceptually simple approach that allows for an analytic solution similar to standard PCA and can be…

2022

Generating Distributional Adversarial Examples to Evade Statistical Detectors

ICML 2022spotlight

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are known to be highly vulnerable to adversarial examples (AEs) that include malicious perturbations. Assumptions about the statistical differences between natural and adversarial inputs are commonplace in many detection techniques. As a best practice, AE detectors are ev…

Cited by 7SourcePDFScholar
2022

Pairwise Fairness for Ordinal Regression

AISTATS 2022poster

We initiate the study of fairness for ordinal regression. We adapt two fairness notions previously considered in fair ranking and propose a strategy for training a predictor that is approximately fair according to either notion. Our predictor has the form of a threshold model, composed of a scoring…

2017

Fairness Constraints: Mechanisms for Fair Classification

AISTATS 2017poster

Algorithmic decision making systems are ubiquitous across a wide variety of online as well as offline services. These systems rely on complex learning methods and vast amounts of data to optimize the service functionality, satisfaction of the end user and profitability. However, there is a growing c…

Cited by 1615SourcePDFScholar
2017

From Parity to Preference-based Notions of Fairness in Classification

NeurIPS 2017poster

The adoption of automated, data-driven decision making in an ever expanding range of applications has raised concerns about its potential unfairness towards certain social groups. In this context, a number of recent studies have focused on defining, detecting, and removing unfairness from data-drive…