papers

These are my notes from research papers I read. Each page’s title is also a link to the abstract or PDF.

Unsolved problems in ML safety

This was a paper we presented about in Irina Rish’s neural scaling laws course (IFT6760A) in winter 2023. You can view the slides we used here, and the recording here (or my backup here).

AlphaTensor: discovering faster matrix multiplication algorithms with reinforcement learning

This was a paper I presented about in Bang Liu’s research group meeting on 2022-10-21. You can view the slides I used here.

Whisper: robust speech recognition via large-scale weak supervision

This was a paper I presented about in Bang Liu’s research group meeting on 2022-09-30. You can view the slides I used here.

Selective annotation makes language models better few-shot learners

Selective annotation chooses a pool of samples to annotate from a large set of unlabeled data. The main result of the paper is that when this is combined with item-specific prompt retrieval the performance drastically improves (>10% relative gain and lower performance variance). Interestingly, selective annotation does not help for finetuning, or when the prompts are randomly selected. They call their selective annotation method “vote-\(k\)”. selective annotation method permalink Vote-\(k\) essentially creates a network of similaraccording to Sentence-BERT unlabeled instances, and then selects from them with a network importance score that is discounted to promote diversityThe discounting is performed by iteratively adding to the selection set, each time penalizing new nodes for being close to nodes that are already in the selection set.
Read more

Trivial or impossible—dichotomous data difficulty masks model differences (on ImageNet and beyond)

We observe that 48.2% [of] images [in ImageNet] are learned by all models regardless of their inductive bias; 14.3% [of] images are consistently misclassified by all models; only roughly a third (37.5%) of images are responsible for the differences between two models’ decisions. We call this phenomenon dichotomous data difficulty (DDD). The authors varied hyperparameters, optimizers, architectures, supervision modes, and sampling methods, finding that models only varied in performance on about a third of the images in the dataset.
Read more