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Nishanth Dikkala

15 accepted papers

2025

A Implies B: Circuit Analysis in LLMs for Propositional Logical Reasoning

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

Due to the size and complexity of modern large language models (LLMs), it has proven challenging to uncover the underlying mechanisms that models use to solve reasoning problems. For instance, is their reasoning for a specific problem localized to certain parts of the network? Do they break down the…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

BIG-Bench Extra Hard

ACL 2025long

Current benchmarks for large language model (LLM) reasoning predominantly focus on mathematical and coding abilities, leaving a gap in evaluating broader reasoning proficiencies. One particular exception is the BIG-Bench dataset, which has served as a crucial benchmark for evaluating the general rea…

2025

Reasoning with Latent Thoughts: On the Power of Looped Transformers

ICLR 2025poster

Large language models have shown remarkable reasoning abilities and scaling laws suggest that large parameter count, especially along the depth axis, is the primary driver. In this work, we make a stronger claim --- many reasoning problems require a large depth but not necessarily many parameters. T…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2024

Causal language modeling can elicit search and reasoning capabilities on logic puzzles

NeurIPS 2024poster

Causal language modeling using the Transformer architecture has yielded remarkable capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) over the last few years. However, the extent to which fundamental search and reasoning capabilities emerged within LLMs remains a topic of ongoing debate. In this work, we…

2024

ReMI: A Dataset for Reasoning with Multiple Images

NeurIPS 2024poster

With the continuous advancement of large language models (LLMs), it is essential to create new benchmarks to evaluate their expanding capabilities and identify areas for improvement. This work focuses on multi-image reasoning, an emerging capability in state-of-the-art LLMs. We introduce ReMI, a dat…

Cited by 12SourcePDFScholar
2023

Alternating Updates for Efficient Transformers

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

It has been well established that increasing scale in deep transformer networks leads to improved quality and performance. However, this increase in scale often comes with prohibitive increases in compute cost and inference latency. We introduce Alternating Updates (AltUp), a simple-to-implement met…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2023

On the Benefits of Learning to Route in Mixture-of-Experts Models

EMNLP 2023long main

Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) Transformer models, such as the Switch Transformer, allow us to successfully scale up model sizes while keeping the amount of compute time fixed. Prior work has established the computational efficiency benefits of using these models. A core component of these models is a rout…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

A Theoretical View on Sparsely Activated Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Deep and wide neural networks successfully fit very complex functions today, but dense models are starting to be prohibitively expensive for inference. To mitigate this, one promising research direction is networks that activate a sparse subgraph of the network. The subgraph is chosen by a data-depe…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2022

Do More Negative Samples Necessarily Hurt In Contrastive Learning?

ICML 2022oral

Recent investigations in noise contrastive estimation suggest, both empirically as well as theoretically, that while having more “negative samples” in the contrastive loss improves downstream classification performance initially, beyond a threshold, it hurts downstream performance due to a “collisio…

Cited by 49SourcePDFScholar
2022

Sketching based Representations for Robust Image Classification with Provable Guarantees

NeurIPS 2022accept

How do we provably represent images succinctly so that their essential latent attributes are correctly captured by the representation to as high level of detail as possible? While today's deep networks (such as CNNs) produce image embeddings they do not have any provable properties and seem to work…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2021

Statistical Estimation from Dependent Data

ICML 2021spotlight

We consider a general statistical estimation problem wherein binary labels across different observations are not independent conditioning on their feature vectors, but dependent, capturing settings where e.g. these observations are collected on a spatial domain, a temporal domain, or a social networ…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2020

Logistic regression with peer-group effects via inference in higher-order Ising models

AISTATS 2020poster

Spin glass models, such as the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick, Hopfield and Ising models, are all well-studied members of the exponential family of discrete distributions, and have been influential in a number of application domains where they are used to model correlation phenomena on networks. Convention…

Cited by 18SourcePDFScholar
2020

Minimax Estimation of Conditional Moment Models

NeurIPS 2020poster

We develop an approach for estimating models described via conditional moment restrictions, with a prototypical application being non-parametric instrumental variable regression. We introduce a min-max criterion function, under which the estimation problem can be thought of as solving a zero-sum gam…

2017

Concentration of Multilinear Functions of the Ising Model with Applications to Network Data

NeurIPS 2017poster

We prove near-tight concentration of measure for polynomial functions of the Ising model, under high temperature, improving the radius of concentration guaranteed by known results by polynomial factors in the dimension (i.e.~the number of nodes in the Ising model). We show that our results are optim…