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Samuel Lippl

4 accepted papers

2026

A Theory of How Pretraining Shapes Inductive Bias in Fine-Tuning

ICML 2026poster

Pretraining and fine-tuning are central stages in modern machine learning systems. In practice, feature learning plays an important role across both stages: deep neural networks learn a broad range of useful features during pretraining and further refine those features during fine-tuning. However, a…

Cited by 6Source ↗Scholar ↗
2026

Algorithmic Primitives and Compositional Geometry of Reasoning in Language Models

ICML 2026poster

How do latent and inference time computations enable large language models (LLMs) to solve multi-step reasoning? We introduce a framework for tracing and steering algorithmic primitives that underlie model reasoning. Our approach links reasoning traces to internal activations and evaluates algorithm…

Cited by 0Source ↗Scholar ↗
2025

When does compositional structure yield compositional generalization? A kernel theory.

ICLR 2025poster

Compositional generalization (the ability to respond correctly to novel combinations of familiar components) is thought to be a cornerstone of intelligent behavior. Compositionally structured (e.g. disentangled) representations support this ability; however, the conditions under which they are suffi…

2024

Inductive biases of multi-task learning and finetuning: multiple regimes of feature reuse

NeurIPS 2024poster

Neural networks are often trained on multiple tasks, either simultaneously (multi-task learning, MTL) or sequentially (pretraining and subsequent finetuning, PT+FT). In particular, it is common practice to pretrain neural networks on a large auxiliary task before finetuning on a downstream task with…