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Ramtin Pedarsani

18 accepted papers

2026

pFedMMA: Personalized Federated Fine-Tuning with Multi-Modal Adapter for Vision-Language Models

ICLR 2026poster

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) like CLIP have demonstrated remarkable generalization in zero- and few-shot settings, but adapting them efficiently to decentralized, heterogeneous data remains a challenge. While prompt tuning has emerged as a popular parameter-efficient approach in personalized federa…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Communication-Efficient and Tensorized Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods typically assume that Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on data from a single device or client. However, real-world scenarios often require fine-tuning these models on private data distributed across multiple devices. Federated Learning (FL) offe…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Inverse Reinforcement Learning by Estimating Expertise of Demonstrators

AAAI 2025technical

In Imitation Learning (IL), utilizing suboptimal and heterogeneous demonstrations presents a substantial challenge due to the varied nature of real-world data. However, standard IL algorithms consider these datasets as homogeneous, thereby inheriting the deficiencies of suboptimal demonstrators. Pre…

2025

SPEX: Scaling Feature Interaction Explanations for LLMs

ICML 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized machine learning due to their ability to capture complex interactions between input features. Popular post-hoc explanation methods like SHAP provide *marginal* feature attributions, while their extensions to interaction importances only scale to small…

2024

Learning to Understand: Identifying Interactions via the Möbius Transform

NeurIPS 2024poster

One of the key challenges in machine learning is to find interpretable representations of learned functions. The Möbius transform is essential for this purpose, as its coefficients correspond to unique *importance scores* for *sets of input variables*. This transform is closely related to widely use…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Equal Improvability: A New Fairness Notion Considering the Long-term Impact

ICLR 2023poster

Devising a fair classifier that does not discriminate against different groups is an important problem in machine learning. Although researchers have proposed various ways of defining group fairness, most of them only focused on the immediate fairness, ignoring the long-term impact of a fair classif…

2022

Adaptive Node Participation for Straggler-Resilient Federated Learning

ICASSP 2022accepted

Federated learning is prone to multiple system challenges including system heterogeneity where clients have different computation and communication capabilities. Such heterogeneity in clients’ computation speeds has a negative effect on the scalability of federated learning algorithms and causes sig…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2022

Imitation Learning by Estimating Expertise of Demonstrators

ICML 2022spotlight

Many existing imitation learning datasets are collected from multiple demonstrators, each with different expertise at different parts of the environment. Yet, standard imitation learning algorithms typically treat all demonstrators as homogeneous, regardless of their expertise, absorbing the weaknes…

2021

Cooperative Autonomous Vehicles that Sympathize with Human Drivers

IROS 2021poster

Widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles will not become a reality until solutions are developed that enable these intelligent agents to co-exist with humans. This includes safely and efficiently interacting with human-driven vehicles, especially in both conflictive and competitive scenarios. We b…

Cited by 57SourceScholar
2021

Emergent Prosociality in Multi-Agent Games Through Gifting

IJCAI 2021poster

Coordination is often critical to forming prosocial behaviors -- behaviors that increase the overall sum of rewards received by all agents in a multi-agent game. However, state of the art reinforcement learning algorithms often suffer from converging to socially less desirable equilibria when multip…

Cited by 35SourcePDFScholar
2021

Fundamental Limits of Ridge-Regularized Empirical Risk Minimization in High Dimensions

AISTATS 2021poster

Despite the popularity of Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) algorithms, a theory that explains their statistical properties in modern high-dimensional regimes is only recently emerging. We characterize for the first time the fundamental limits on the statistical accuracy of convex ridge-regularized…

Cited by 48SourcePDFScholar
2020

FedPAQ: A Communication-Efficient Federated Learning Method with Periodic Averaging and Quantization

AISTATS 2020poster

Federated learning is a distributed framework according to which a model is trained over a set of devices, while keeping data localized. This framework faces several systems-oriented challenges which include (i) communication bottleneck since a large number of devices upload their local updates to…

Cited by 1017SourcePDFScholar
2020

Polarizing Front Ends for Robust Cnns

ICASSP 2020accepted

The vulnerability of deep neural networks to small, adversarially designed perturbations can be attributed to their "excessive linearity." In this paper, we propose a bottom-up strategy for attenuating adversarial perturbations using a nonlinear front end which polarizes and quantizes the data. We o…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2020

Quantized Decentralized Stochastic Learning over Directed Graphs

ICML 2020poster

We consider a decentralized stochastic learning problem where data points are distributed among computing nodes communicating over a directed graph. As the model size gets large, decentralized learning faces a major bottleneck that is the heavy communication load due to each node transmitting large…

Cited by 69SourcePDFScholar
2020

Robust Federated Learning: The Case of Affine Distribution Shifts

NeurIPS 2020poster

Federated learning is a distributed paradigm that aims at training models using samples distributed across multiple users in a network while keeping the samples on users’ devices with the aim of efficiency and protecting users privacy. In such settings, the training data is often statistically he…

Cited by 196SourcePDFScholar
2020

Sharp Asymptotics and Optimal Performance for Inference in Binary Models

AISTATS 2020poster

We study convex empirical risk minimization for high-dimensional inference in binary models. Our first result sharply predicts the statistical performance of such estimators in the linear asymptotic regime under isotropic Gaussian features. Importantly, the predictions hold for a wide class of conve…

Cited by 41SourcePDFScholar
2019

Robust and Communication-Efficient Collaborative Learning

NeurIPS 2019poster

We consider a decentralized learning problem, where a set of computing nodes aim at solving a non-convex optimization problem collaboratively. It is well-known that decentralized optimization schemes face two major system bottlenecks: stragglers' delay and communication overhead. In this paper, we t…

Cited by 126SourcePDFScholar