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Stefano Massaroli

19 accepted papers

2025

Exploring Diffusion Transformer Designs via Grafting

NeurIPS 2025oral

Designing model architectures requires decisions such as selecting operators (e.g., attention, convolution) and configurations (e.g., depth, width). However, evaluating the impact of these decisions on model quality requires costly pretraining, limiting architectural investigation. Inspired by how n…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Quantifying Memory Utilization with Effective State-Size

ICML 2025poster

As the space of causal sequence modeling architectures continues to grow, the need to develop a general framework for their analysis becomes increasingly important. With this aim, we draw insights from classical signal processing and control theory, to develop a quantitative measure of *memory utili…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

STAR: Synthesis of Tailored Architectures

ICLR 2025oral

Iterative improvement of model architectures is fundamental to deep learning: Transformers first enabled scaling, and recent advances in model hybridization have pushed the quality-efficiency frontier. However, optimizing architectures remains challenging and expensive, with a variety of automated o…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Mechanistic Design and Scaling of Hybrid Architectures

ICML 2024poster

The development of deep learning architectures is a resource-demanding process, due to a vast design space, long prototyping times, and high compute costs associated with at-scale model training and evaluation. We set out to simplify this process by grounding it in an end-to-end mechanistic architec…

2024

State-Free Inference of State-Space Models: The *Transfer Function* Approach

ICML 2024poster

We approach designing a state-space model for deep learning applications through its dual representation, the *transfer function*, and uncover a highly efficient sequence parallel inference algorithm that is *state-free*: unlike other proposed algorithms, state-free inference does not incur any sign…

2023

Deep Latent State Space Models for Time-Series Generation

ICML 2023poster

Methods based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) are widely used to build generative models of time-series. In addition to high computational overhead due to explicitly computing hidden states recurrence, existing ODE-based models fall short in learning sequence data with sharp transitions -…

2023

Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models

ICML 2023oral

Recent advances in deep learning have relied heavily on the use of large Transformers due to their ability to learn at scale. However, the core building block of Transformers, the attention operator, exhibits quadratic cost in sequence length, limiting the amount of context accessible. Existing subq…

2023

HyenaDNA: Long-Range Genomic Sequence Modeling at Single Nucleotide Resolution

NeurIPS 2023spotlight

Genomic (DNA) sequences encode an enormous amount of information for gene regulation and protein synthesis. Similar to natural language models, researchers have proposed foundation models in genomics to learn generalizable features from unlabeled genome data that can then be fine-tuned for downstrea…

2023

Ideal Abstractions for Decision-Focused Learning

AISTATS 2023poster

We present a methodology for formulating simplifying abstractions in machine learning systems by identifying and harnessing the utility structure of decisions. Machine learning tasks commonly involve high-dimensional output spaces (e.g., predictions for every pixel in an image or node in a graph), e…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2023

Improving *day-ahead* Solar Irradiance Time Series Forecasting by Leveraging Spatio-Temporal Context

NeurIPS 2023poster

Solar power harbors immense potential in mitigating climate change by substantially reducing CO$_{2}$ emissions. Nonetheless, the inherent variability of solar irradiance poses a significant challenge for seamlessly integrating solar power into the electrical grid. While the majority of prior resear…

2023

Laughing Hyena Distillery: Extracting Compact Recurrences From Convolutions

NeurIPS 2023poster

Recent advances in attention-free sequence models rely on convolutions as alternatives to the attention operator at the core of Transformers. In particular, long convolution sequence models have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many domains, but incur a significant cost during auto-regressiv…

Cited by 25SourcePDFScholar
2023

Learning Efficient Surrogate Dynamic Models with Graph Spline Networks

NeurIPS 2023poster

While complex simulations of physical systems have been widely used in engineering and scientific computing, lowering their often prohibitive computational requirements has only recently been tackled by deep learning approaches. In this paper, we present GraphSplineNets, a novel deep-learning method…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2022

Neural Solvers for Fast and Accurate Numerical Optimal Control

ICLR 2022poster

Synthesizing optimal controllers for dynamical systems often involves solving optimization problems with hard real-time constraints. These constraints determine the class of numerical methods that can be applied: computationally expensive but accurate numerical routines are replaced by fast and inac…

2022

Self-Similarity Priors: Neural Collages as Differentiable Fractal Representations

NeurIPS 2022accept

Many patterns in nature exhibit self-similarity: they can be compactly described via self-referential transformations. Said patterns commonly appear in natural and artificial objects, such as molecules, shorelines, galaxies, and even images. In this work, we investigate the role of learning in the a…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2022

Transform Once: Efficient Operator Learning in Frequency Domain

NeurIPS 2022accept

Spectral analysis provides one of the most effective paradigms for information-preserving dimensionality reduction, as simple descriptions of naturally occurring signals are often obtained via few terms of periodic basis functions. In this work, we study deep neural networks designed to harness the…

2021

Differentiable Multiple Shooting Layers

NeurIPS 2021poster

We detail a novel class of implicit neural models. Leveraging time-parallel methods for differential equations, Multiple Shooting Layers (MSLs) seek solutions of initial value problems via parallelizable root-finding algorithms. MSLs broadly serve as drop-in replacements for neural ordinary differe…

Cited by 23SourcePDFScholar
2021

Neural Hybrid Automata: Learning Dynamics With Multiple Modes and Stochastic Transitions

NeurIPS 2021poster

Effective control and prediction of dynamical systems require appropriate handling of continuous-time and discrete, event-triggered processes. Stochastic hybrid systems (SHSs), common across engineering domains, provide a formalism for dynamical systems subject to discrete, possibly stochastic, stat…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2020

Hypersolvers: Toward Fast Continuous-Depth Models

NeurIPS 2020poster

The infinite-depth paradigm pioneered by Neural ODEs has launched a renaissance in the search for novel dynamical system-inspired deep learning primitives; however, their utilization in problems of non-trivial size has often proved impossible due to poor computational scalability. This work paves th…