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Nicholas Roberts

9 accepted papers

2026

Procedural Generation Of Algorithm Discovery Tasks in Machine Learning

ICML 2026poster

Automating the development of machine learning algorithms has the potential to unlock new breakthroughs. However, our ability to improve and evaluate algorithm discovery systems has thus far been limited by existing task suites. They suffer from many issues, such as: poor evaluation methodologies; d…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Compute Optimal Scaling of Skills: Knowledge vs Reasoning

ACL 2025finding

Scaling laws are a critical component of the LLM development pipeline, most famously as a way to forecast training decisions such as ‘compute-optimally’ trading-off parameter count and dataset size, alongside a more recent growing list of other crucial decisions. In this work, we ask whether compute…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Stronger Than You Think: Benchmarking Weak Supervision on Realistic Tasks

NeurIPS 2024poster

Weak supervision (WS) is a popular approach for label-efficient learning, leveraging diverse sources of noisy but inexpensive *weak labels* to automatically annotate training data. Despite its wide usage, WS and its practical value are challenging to benchmark due to the many knobs in its setup, inc…

2023

Generative Modeling Helps Weak Supervision (and Vice Versa)

ICLR 2023poster

Many promising applications of supervised machine learning face hurdles in the acquisition of labeled data in sufficient quantity and quality, creating an expensive bottleneck. To overcome such limitations, techniques that do not depend on ground truth labels have been studied, including weak superv…

2023

Geometry-Aware Adaptation for Pretrained Models

NeurIPS 2023poster

Machine learning models---including prominent zero-shot models---are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

Skill-it! A data-driven skills framework for understanding and training language models

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

The quality of training data impacts the performance of pre-trained large language models (LMs). Given a fixed budget of tokens, we study how to best select data that leads to good downstream model performance across tasks. We develop a new framework based on a simple hypothesis: just as humans acqu…

Cited by 65SourcePDFScholar
2022

AutoWS-Bench-101: Benchmarking Automated Weak Supervision with 100 Labels

NeurIPS 2022accept

Weak supervision (WS) is a powerful method to build labeled datasets for training supervised models in the face of little-to-no labeled data. It replaces hand-labeling data with aggregating multiple noisy-but-cheap label estimates expressed by labeling functions (LFs). While it has been used success…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2022

NAS-Bench-360: Benchmarking Neural Architecture Search on Diverse Tasks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Most existing neural architecture search (NAS) benchmarks and algorithms prioritize well-studied tasks, e.g. image classification on CIFAR or ImageNet. This makes the performance of NAS approaches in more diverse areas poorly understood. In this paper, we present NAS-Bench-360, a benchmark suite to…