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Vaishaal Shankar

22 accepted papers

2026

OpenThoughts: Data Recipes for Reasoning Models

ICLR 2026oral

Reasoning models have made rapid progress on many benchmarks involving math, code, and science. Yet, there are still many open questions about the best train- ing recipes for reasoning since state-of-the-art models often rely on proprietary datasets with little to no public information available. To…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Datasets, Documents, and Repetitions: The Practicalities of Unequal Data Quality

NeurIPS 2025poster

Data filtering has become a powerful tool for improving model performance while reducing computational cost. However, as large language model compute budgets continue to grow, the limited data volume provided by heavily filtered and deduplicated datasets will become a practical constraint. In effort…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Language models scale reliably with over-training and on downstream tasks

ICLR 2025poster

Scaling laws are useful guides for derisking expensive training runs, as they predict performance of large models using cheaper, small-scale experiments. However, there remain gaps between current scaling studies and how language models are ultimately trained and evaluated. For instance, scaling is…

2025

TiC-LM: A Web-Scale Benchmark for Time-Continual LLM Pretraining

ACL 2025long

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained on historical web data inevitably become outdated. We investigate evaluation strategies and update methods for LLMs as new data becomes available. We introduce a web-scale dataset for time-continual pretraining of LLMs derived from 114 dumps of Common Crawl (CC)…

2024

Data Filtering Networks

ICLR 2024poster

Large training sets have become a cornerstone of machine learning and are the foundation for recent advances in language modeling and multimodal learning. While data curation for pre-training is often still ad-hoc, one common paradigm is to first collect a massive pool of data from the Web and then…

Cited by 153SourcePDFScholar
2024

DataComp-LM: In search of the next generation of training sets for language models

NeurIPS 2024poster

We introduce DataComp for Language Models, a testbed for controlled dataset experiments with the goal of improving language models. As part of DCLM, we provide a standardized corpus of 240T tokens extracted from Common Crawl, effective pretraining recipes based on the OpenLM framework, and a broad s…

Cited by 64SourcePDFScholar
2024

Dataset Decomposition: Faster LLM Training with Variable Sequence Length Curriculum

NeurIPS 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly trained on datasets consisting of fixed-length token sequences. These datasets are created by randomly concatenating documents of various lengths and then chunking them into sequences of a predetermined target length (concat-and-chunk). Recent attention impl…

2024

Pre-trained Language Models Do Not Help Auto-regressive Text-to-Image Generation

EMNLP 2024main

Recent advances in image tokenizers, such as VQ-VAE, have enabled text-to-image generation using auto-regressive methods, similar to language modeling. However, these methods have yet to leverage pre-trained language models, despite their adaptability to various downstream tasks. In this work, we ex…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2024

Scalable Pre-training of Large Autoregressive Image Models

ICML 2024poster

This paper introduces AIM, a collection of vision models pre-trained with an autoregressive objective. These models are inspired by their textual counterparts, i.e., Large Language Models (LLMs), and exhibit similar scaling properties. Specifically, we highlight two key findings: (1) the performance…

2024

TiC-CLIP: Continual Training of CLIP Models

ICLR 2024poster

Keeping large foundation models up to date on latest data is inherently expensive. To avoid the prohibitive costs of constantly retraining, it is imperative to continually train these models. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of any large scale continual learning benchmarks or baselines. We in…

2023

DataComp: In search of the next generation of multimodal datasets

NeurIPS 2023oral

Multimodal datasets are a critical component in recent breakthroughs such as CLIP, Stable Diffusion and GPT-4, yet their design does not receive the same research attention as model architectures or training algorithms. To address this shortcoming in the machine learning ecosystem, we introduce Data…

2023

Masked Autoencoding Does Not Help Natural Language Supervision at Scale

CVPR 2023poster

Self supervision and natural language supervision have emerged as two exciting ways to train general purpose image encoders which excel at a variety of downstream tasks. Recent works such as M3AE (Geng et al 2022) and SLIP (Mu et al 2022) have suggested that these approaches can be effectively combi…

Cited by 14SourcePDFScholar
2023

Robustness in Multimodal Learning under Train-Test Modality Mismatch

ICML 2023poster

Multimodal learning is defined as learning over multiple heterogeneous input modalities such as video, audio, and text. In this work, we are concerned with understanding how models behave as the type of modalities differ between training and deployment, a situation that naturally arises in many appl…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar
2022

Data Determines Distributional Robustness in Contrastive Language Image Pre-training (CLIP)

ICML 2022spotlight

Contrastively trained language-image models such as CLIP, ALIGN, and BASIC have demonstrated unprecedented robustness to multiple challenging natural distribution shifts. Since these language-image models differ from previous training approaches in several ways, an important question is what causes…

2021

Accuracy on the Line: on the Strong Correlation Between Out-of-Distribution and In-Distribution Generalization

ICML 2021spotlight

For machine learning systems to be reliable, we must understand their performance in unseen, out- of-distribution environments. In this paper, we empirically show that out-of-distribution performance is strongly correlated with in-distribution performance for a wide range of models and distribution…

Cited by 333SourcePDFScholar
2021

Do Image Classifiers Generalize Across Time?

ICCV 2021poster

Vision models notoriously flicker when applied to videos: they correctly recognize objects in some frames, but fail on perceptually similar, nearby frames. In this work, we systematically analyze the robustness of image classifiers to such temporal perturbations in videos. To do so, we construct two…

Cited by 93PDFcodeScholar
2021

Predicting With Confidence on Unseen Distributions

ICCV 2021poster

Recent work has shown that the accuracy of machine learning models can vary substantially when evaluated on a distribution that even slightly differs from that of the training data. As a result, predicting model performance on previously unseen distributions without access to labeled data is an impo…

Cited by 164PDFScholar
2020

Evaluating Machine Accuracy on ImageNet

ICML 2020poster

We evaluate a wide range of ImageNet models with five trained human labelers. In our year-long experiment, trained humans first annotated 40,000 images from the ImageNet and ImageNetV2 test sets with multi-class labels to enable a semantically coherent evaluation. Then we measured the classification…

Cited by 205SourcePDFScholar
2020

Measuring Robustness to Natural Distribution Shifts in Image Classification

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

We study how robust current ImageNet models are to distribution shifts arising from natural variations in datasets. Most research on robustness focuses on synthetic image perturbations (noise, simulated weather artifacts, adversarial examples, etc.), which leaves open how robustness on synthetic dis…

2020

Neural Kernels Without Tangents

ICML 2020poster

We investigate the connections between neural networks and simple building blocks in kernel space. In particular, using well established feature space tools such as direct sum, averaging, and moment lifting, we present an algebra for creating “compositional” kernels from bags of features. We show th…

Cited by 110SourcePDFScholar
2019

A Meta-Analysis of Overfitting in Machine Learning

NeurIPS 2019poster

We conduct the first large meta-analysis of overfitting due to test set reuse in the machine learning community. Our analysis is based on over one hundred machine learning competitions hosted on the Kaggle platform over the course of several years. In each competition, numerous practitioners repeate…

Cited by 266SourcePDFScholar
2019

Do ImageNet Classifiers Generalize to ImageNet?

ICML 2019oral

We build new test sets for the CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets. Both benchmarks have been the focus of intense research for almost a decade, raising the danger of overfitting to excessively re-used test sets. By closely following the original dataset creation processes, we test to what extent current…