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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 0SourceScholar
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 0SourceScholar
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…