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Simon Schrodi

7 accepted papers

2026

Towards Understanding Subliminal Learning: When and How Hidden Biases Transfer

ICLR 2026poster

Language models can transfer hidden biases during distillation. For example, a teacher that "likes owls" can make its student "like owls" too, even when the training data consists only of lists of numbers. This surprising phenomenon is called *subliminal learning*. Subliminal learning can be expecte…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Two Effects, One Trigger: On the Modality Gap, Object Bias, and Information Imbalance in Contrastive Vision-Language Models

ICLR 2025oral

Contrastive vision-language models (VLMs), like CLIP, have gained popularity for their versatile applicability to various downstream tasks. Despite their successes in some tasks, like zero-shot object recognition, they perform surprisingly poor on other tasks, like attribute recognition. Previous wo…

2025

When and How Does CLIP Enable Domain and Compositional Generalization?

ICML 2025spotlight

The remarkable generalization performance of contrastive vision-language models like CLIP is often attributed to the diversity of their training distributions. However, key questions remain unanswered: Can CLIP generalize to an entirely unseen domain when trained on a diverse mixture of domains (do…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Eureka-Moments in Transformers: Multi-Step Tasks Reveal Softmax Induced Optimization Problems

ICML 2024poster

In this work, we study rapid improvements of the training loss in transformers when being confronted with multi-step decision tasks. We found that transformers struggle to learn the intermediate task and both training and validation loss saturate for hundreds of epochs. When transformers finally lea…

2023

Construction of Hierarchical Neural Architecture Search Spaces based on Context-free Grammars

NeurIPS 2023poster

The discovery of neural architectures from simple building blocks is a long-standing goal of Neural Architecture Search (NAS). Hierarchical search spaces are a promising step towards this goal but lack a unifying search space design framework and typically only search over some limited aspect of arc…