Related papers: Just Train Twice: Improving Group Robustness witho…
State-of-the-art, high capacity deep neural networks not only require large amounts of labelled training data, they are also highly susceptible to label errors in this data, typically resulting in large efforts and costs and therefore…
A BERT-based Neural Ranking Model (NRM) can be either a crossencoder or a bi-encoder. Between the two, bi-encoder is highly efficient because all the documents can be pre-processed before the actual query time. In this work, we show two…
Deep learning models trained to optimize average accuracy often exhibit systematic failures on particular subpopulations. In real world settings, the subpopulations most affected by such disparities are frequently unlabeled or unknown,…
Recent state-of-the-art language models utilize a two-phase training procedure comprised of (i) unsupervised pre-training on unlabeled text, and (ii) fine-tuning for a specific supervised task. More recently, many studies have been focused…
Minimizing the empirical risk is a popular training strategy, but for learning tasks where the data may be noisy or heavy-tailed, one may require many observations in order to generalize well. To achieve better performance under less…
In recent years, there is a growing need to train machine learning models on a huge volume of data. Designing efficient distributed optimization algorithms for empirical risk minimization (ERM) has therefore become an active and challenging…
Deep neural networks trained via empirical risk minimisation often exhibit significant performance disparities across groups, particularly when group and task labels are spuriously correlated (e.g., "grassy background" and "cows"). Existing…
This paper proposes a novel, abstraction-based, certified training method for robust image classifiers. Via abstraction, all perturbed images are mapped into intervals before feeding into neural networks for training. By training on…
Online Reinforcement Learning (RL) is typically framed as the process of minimizing cumulative regret (CR) through interactions with an unknown environment. However, real-world RL applications usually involve a sequence of tasks, and the…
Selecting an effective training signal for machine learning tasks is difficult: expert annotations are expensive, and crowd-sourced annotations may not be reliable. Recent work has demonstrated that learning from a distribution over labels…
Modern deep learning models often achieve high overall performance, but consistently fail on specific subgroups. Group distributionally robust optimization (group DRO) addresses this problem by minimizing the worst-group loss, but it fails…
Training sequential recommenders such as SASRec with uniform sample weights achieves good overall performance but can fall short on specific user groups. One such example is popularity bias, where mainstream users receive better…
A major challenge of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world applications is the variation between environments, tasks or clients. Meta-RL (MRL) addresses this issue by learning a meta-policy that adapts to new tasks. Standard MRL methods…
Multi-task learning (MTL) aims to improve estimation and prediction performance by sharing common information among related tasks. One natural assumption in MTL is that tasks are classified into clusters based on their characteristics.…
Multi-task learning (MTL) considers learning a joint model for multiple tasks by optimizing a convex combination of all task losses. To solve the optimization problem, existing methods use an adaptive weight updating scheme, where task…
Uncertainty is ubiquitous in real-world data, and the assumptions underlying classical linear regression models are often violated in practice. Inspired by the theory of sublinear expectation, we consider a linear regression model where the…
In this work, we propose to progressively increase the training difficulty during learning a neural network model via a novel strategy which we call mini-batch trimming. This strategy makes sure that the optimizer puts its focus in the…
Usually considered as a classification problem, entity resolution (ER) can be very challenging on real data due to the prevalence of dirty values. The state-of-the-art solutions for ER were built on a variety of learning models (most…
Acquiring and training on large-scale labeled data can be impractical due to cost constraints. Additionally, the use of small training datasets can result in considerable variability in model outcomes, overfitting, and learning of spurious…
Large Language Models trained on web-scale text acquire language generation abilities that can solve a wide range of tasks, particularly when task knowledge is refined into the generative prior using in-context examples. However, spurious…