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Newsha Ardalani

8 accepted papers

2026

Composer: A Search Framework for Hybrid Neural Architecture Design

ICLR 2026poster

Hybrid model architectures that combine computational primitives (e.g., Attention, MLP) in different ratios have shown promising performance beyond Transformers. Some studies have shown that different interleavings of primitives can affect model quality as well. However, prior works explore the hybr…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

How Text Quality Interventions Reshape Neural Scaling Laws for LLMs: Empirical Study

ICLR 2026poster

Neural scaling laws are widely used for performance projection and resource planning, yet their sensitivity to data quality interventions remains poorly understood. We present an empirical study of how interventions—deduplication, heuristic filtering, and LLM-guided rewriting—reshape scaling behavi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Quagmires in SFT-RL Post-Training: When High SFT Scores Mislead and What to Use Instead

ICLR 2026poster

In post-training for reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs), the current state of practice trains LLMs in two independent stages: Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR, shortened as "RL" below). In this work, we challenge whether high SFT scores transl…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

CATransformers: Carbon Aware Transformers Through Joint Model-Hardware Optimization

NeurIPS 2025poster

Machine learning solutions are rapidly adopted to enable a variety of key use cases, from conversational AI assistants to scientific discovery. As the adoption of machine learning models becomes increasingly prevalent, the associated lifecycle carbon footprint is expected to increase, including both…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Demystifying Synthetic Data in LLM Pre-training: A Systematic Study of Scaling Laws, Benefits, and Pitfalls

EMNLP 2025

Training data plays a crucial role in Large Language Models (LLM) scaling, yet high quality data is of limited supply. Synthetic data techniques offer a potential path toward sidestepping these limitations.We conduct a large-scale empirical investigation (>1000 LLMs with >100k GPU hours) using a uni

2024

Sieve: Multimodal Dataset Pruning using Image Captioning Models

CVPR 2024poster

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are pretrained on large diverse and noisy web-crawled datasets. This underscores the critical need for dataset pruning as the quality of these datasets is strongly correlated with the performance of VLMs on downstream tasks. Using CLIPScore from a pretrained model to on…

2024

Toward Efficient Inference for Mixture of Experts

NeurIPS 2024poster

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models have recently gained steam in achieving the state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. They effectively expand the model capacity while incurring a minimal increase in computation cost during training. How…

2023

DataPerf: Benchmarks for Data-Centric AI Development

NeurIPS 2023poster

Machine learning research has long focused on models rather than datasets, and prominent datasets are used for common ML tasks without regard to the breadth, difficulty, and faithfulness of the underlying problems. Neglecting the fundamental importance of data has given rise to inaccuracy, bias, and…