14 accepted papers
Generating high-quality synthetic text under differential privacy (DP) is critical for training and evaluating language models without compromising user privacy. Prior work on synthesizing DP *datasets* often fail to preserve key statistical attributes, suffer utility loss from the noise required by…
Model merging offers an effective strategy to combine the strengths of multiple finetuned models into a unified model that preserves the specialized capabilities of each. Existing methods merge models in a global manner, performing arithmetic operations across all model parameters. However, such glo…
As high-quality public text approaches exhaustion, a phenomenon known as the Data Wall—LLM pre-training is shifting from more tokens to better tokens. However, existing methods either rely on heuristic static filters that ignore training dynamics, or use dynamic yet optimizer-agnostic criteria based…
Online reinforcement learning (RL) excels in complex, safety-critical domains but suffers from sample inefficiency, training instability, and limited interpretability. Data attribution provides a principled way to trace model behavior back to training samples, yet existing methods assume fixed datas…
We propose the notion of empirical privacy variance and study it in the context of differentially private fine-tuning of language models. Specifically, we show that models calibrated to the same $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-DP guarantee using DP-SGD with different hyperparameter configurations can exhibi…
Model merging provides a scalable alternative to multi-task training by combining specialized finetuned models through parameter arithmetic, enabling efficient deployment without the need for joint training or access to all task data. While recent methods have shown promise, existing evaluations are…
Data attribution methods, which quantify the influence of individual training data points on a machine learning model, have gained increasing popularity in data-centric applications in modern AI. Despite a recent surge of new methods developed in this space, the impact of hyperparameter tuning in th…
To develop the next generation of intelligent LiDARs, we propose a novel framework of parallel LiDARs and construct a hardware prototype in our experimental platform, DAWN (Digital Artificial World for Natural). It emphasizes the tight integration of physical and digital space in LiDAR systems, with…
How can we attribute the behaviors of machine learning models to their training data? While the classic influence function sheds light on the impact of individual samples, it often fails to capture the more complex and pronounced collective influence of a set of samples. To tackle this challenge, we…
Linear scalarization, i.e., combining all loss functions by a weighted sum, has been the default choice in the literature of multi-task learning (MTL) since its inception. In recent years, there is a surge of interest in developing Specialized Multi-Task Optimizers (SMTOs) that treat MTL as a multi-…
While it has long been empirically observed that adversarial robustness may be at odds with standard accuracy and may have further disparate impacts on different classes, it remains an open question to what extent such observations hold and how the class imbalance plays a role within. In this paper,…
We show that the simplest actor-critic method — a linear softmax policy updated with TD through interaction with a linear MDP, but featuring no explicit regularization or exploration — does not merely find an optimal policy, but moreover prefers high entropy optimal policies. To demonstrate the stre…
In the Mixup training paradigm, a model is trained using convex combinations of data points and their associated labels. Despite seeing very few true data points during training, models trained using Mixup seem to still minimize the original empirical risk and exhibit better generalization and robus…
Recent years have witnessed intensive research interests on training deep neural networks (DNNs) more efficiently by quantization-based compression methods, which facilitate DNNs training in two ways: (1) activations are quantized to shrink the memory consumption, and (2) gradients are quantized to…