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Umar Syed

11 accepted papers

2025

Escaping Collapse: The Strength of Weak Data for Large Language Model Training

NeurIPS 2025poster

Synthetically-generated data plays an increasingly larger role in training large language models. However, while synthetic data has been found to be useful, studies have also shown that without proper curation it can cause LLM performance to plateau, or even "collapse", after many training iteration…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Near-optimal algorithms for private estimation and sequential testing of collision probability

AISTATS 2025poster

We present new algorithms for estimating and testing \emph{collision probability}, a fundamental measure of the spread of a discrete distribution that is widely used in many scientific fields. We describe an algorithm that satisfies $(\alpha, \beta)$-local differential privacy and estimates collisio…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Private prediction for large-scale synthetic text generation

EMNLP 2024finding

We present an approach for generating differentially private synthetic text using large language models (LLMs), via private prediction. In the private prediction framework, we only require the output synthetic data to satisfy differential privacy guarantees. This is in contrast to approaches that tr…

2023

Label differential privacy and private training data release

ICML 2023poster

We study differentially private mechanisms for sharing training data in machine learning settings. Our goal is to enable learning of an accurate predictive model while protecting the privacy of each user's label. Previous work established privacy guarantees that assumed the features are public and g…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2022

Label differential privacy via clustering

AISTATS 2022poster

We present new mechanisms for label differential privacy, a relaxation of differentially private machine learning that only protects the privacy of the labels in the training set. Our mechanisms cluster the examples in the training set using their (non-private) feature vectors, randomly re-sample ea…

2022

Private and Communication-Efficient Algorithms for Entropy Estimation

NeurIPS 2022accept

Modern statistical estimation is often performed in a distributed setting where each sample belongs to single user who shares their data with a central server. Users are typically concerned with preserving the privacy of their sample, and also with minimizing the amount of data they must transmit to…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2021

Private optimization without constraint violations

AISTATS 2021poster

We study the problem of differentially private optimization with linear constraints when the right-hand-side of the constraints depends on private data. This type of problem appears in many applications, especially resource allocation. Previous research provided solutions that retained privacy but s…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar