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Varun Chandrasekaran

13 accepted papers

2025

Attention Speaks Volumes: Localizing and Mitigating Bias in Language Models

ACL 2025long

We believe that analyzing attention is crucial for understanding bias in large language models (LLMs); in ambiguous comparative prompting frameworks, it provides insight into how the LLM distributes its focus across different entities, and how this contributes to biased decisions. To this end, we fi…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Not All Wrong is Bad: Using Adversarial Examples for Unlearning

ICML 2025spotlight

Machine unlearning, where users can request the deletion of a forget dataset, is becoming increasingly important because of numerous privacy regulations. Initial works on "exact'' unlearning (e.g., retraining) incur large computational overheads. However, while computationally inexpensive, "approxim…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Training Robust Ensembles Requires Rethinking Lipschitz Continuity

ICLR 2025poster

Transferability of adversarial examples is a well-known property that endangers all classification models, even those that are only accessible through black-box queries. Prior work has shown that an ensemble of models is more resilient to transferability: the probability that an adversarial example…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Unearthing Skill-level Insights for Understanding Trade-offs of Foundation Models

ICLR 2025poster

With models getting stronger, evaluations have grown more complex, testing multiple skills in one benchmark and even in the same instance at once. However, skill-wise performance is obscured when inspecting aggregate accuracy, under-utilizing the rich signal modern benchmarks contain. We propose an…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

Attention Satisfies: A Constraint-Satisfaction Lens on Factual Errors of Language Models

ICLR 2024poster

We investigate the internal behavior of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) when they generate factually incorrect text. We propose modeling factual queries as constraint satisfaction problems and use this framework to investigate how the LLM interacts internally with factual constraints.…

2024

Designing Informative Metrics for Few-Shot Example Selection

ACL 2024findings

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown remarkable few-shot learning capabilities when provided with properly formatted examples. However, selecting the “best” examples remains an open challenge. We propose a complexity-based prompt selection approach for sequence tagging tasks. This approach a…

Cited by 1SourcePDFScholar
2024

KITAB: Evaluating LLMs on Constraint Satisfaction for Information Retrieval

ICLR 2024poster

We study the ability of state-of-the art models to answer constraint satisfaction queries for information retrieval (e.g., “a list of ice cream shops in San Diego”). In the past, such queries were considered as tasks that could only be solved via web-search or knowledge bases. More recently, large l…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2024

Privately Aligning Language Models with Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2024poster

Positioned between pre-training and user deployment, aligning large language models (LLMs) through reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a prevailing strategy for training instruction following-models such as ChatGPT. In this work, we initiate the study of privacy-preserving alignment of LLMs t…

Cited by 9SourcePDFScholar
2024

Teaching Language Models to Hallucinate Less with Synthetic Tasks

ICLR 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) frequently hallucinate on abstractive summarization tasks such as document-based question-answering, meeting summarization, and clinical report generation, even though all necessary information is included in context. However, optimizing to make LLMs hallucinate less is…

Cited by 31SourcePDFScholar
2021

A General Framework For Detecting Anomalous Inputs to DNN Classifiers

ICML 2021oral

Detecting anomalous inputs, such as adversarial and out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, is critical for classifiers (including deep neural networks or DNNs) deployed in real-world applications. While prior works have proposed various methods to detect such anomalous samples using information from the…