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Nikhil Kandpal

10 accepted papers

2025

AttriBoT: A Bag of Tricks for Efficiently Approximating Leave-One-Out Context Attribution

ICLR 2025poster

The influence of contextual input on the behavior of large language models (LLMs) has prompted the development of context attribution methods that aim to quantify each context span's effect on an LLM's generations. The leave-one-out (LOO) error, which measures the change in the likelihood of the LLM…

2025

Efficient Model Development through Fine-tuning Transfer

EMNLP 2025

Modern LLMs face a major obstacle: each new pre-trained model version requires expensive and repetitive alignment. We propose a method that transfers fine-tuning updates across model versions. The key idea is to extract the *diff vector*, which is the difference in parameters induced by fine-tuning,

2025

Enhancing Training Data Attribution with Representational Optimization

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Training data attribution (TDA) methods aim to measure how training data impacts a model's predictions. While gradient-based attribution methods, such as influence functions, offer theoretical grounding, their computational costs make them impractical for large-scale applications. Representation-b…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) are typically trained on enormous quantities of unlicensed text, a practice that has led to scrutiny due to possible intellectual property infringement and ethical concerns. Training LLMs on openly licensed text presents a first step towards addressing these issues, but…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

User Inference Attacks on Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Text written by humans makes up the vast majority of the data used to pre-train and fine-tune large language models (LLMs). Many sources of this data—like code, forum posts, personal websites, and books—are easily attributed to one or a few “users”. In this paper, we ask if it is possible to infer i…

Cited by 28SourcePDFScholar
2023

Git-Theta: A Git Extension for Collaborative Development of Machine Learning Models

ICML 2023poster

Currently, most machine learning models are trained by centralized teams and are rarely updated. In contrast, open-source software development involves the iterative development of a shared artifact through distributed collaboration using a version control system. In the interest of enabling collabo…

2023

Large Language Models Struggle to Learn Long-Tail Knowledge

ICML 2023poster

The Internet contains a wealth of knowledge---from the birthdays of historical figures to tutorials on how to code---all of which may be learned by language models. However, while certain pieces of information are ubiquitous on the web, others appear extremely rarely. In this paper, we study the rel…

2022

Deduplicating Training Data Mitigates Privacy Risks in Language Models

ICML 2022spotlight

Past work has shown that large language models are susceptible to privacy attacks, where adversaries generate sequences from a trained model and detect which sequences are memorized from the training set. In this work, we show that the success of these attacks is largely due to duplication in common…