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Our goal is to improve reliability of Machine Learning (ML) systems deployed in the wild. ML models perform exceedingly well when test examples are similar to train examples. However, real-world applications are required to perform on any…
Foundation models are routinely fine-tuned for use in particular domains, yet safety assessments are typically conducted only on base models, implicitly assuming that safety properties persist through downstream adaptation. We test this…
The rapid development of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications requires the training of large numbers of models. This growing demand highlights the importance of training models without human supervision, while…
Machine learning (ML) systems are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains where reliability is paramount. This thesis investigates how uncertainty estimation can enhance the safety and trustworthiness of ML, focusing on selective…
Discrete-time random walks and their extensions are common tools for analyzing animal movement data. In these analyses, resolution of temporal discretization is a critical feature. Ideally, a model both mirrors the relevant temporal scale…
As machine learning models become increasingly prevalent in critical decision-making models and systems in fields like finance, healthcare, etc., ensuring their robustness against adversarial attacks and changes in the input data is…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly consulted for high-stakes life advice, yet they lack standard safeguards against providing confident but misguided responses. This creates risks of sycophancy and over-confidence. This paper…
As the capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) continue to improve, they are increasingly targeted by jailbreak attacks. Existing defense methods face two major limitations: (1) they struggle to ensure safety without compromising the…
Advancements in deep learning have significantly improved model performance across tasks involving code, text, and image processing. However, these models still exhibit notable mispredictions in real-world applications, even when trained on…
Steering or intervening on model representations at inference time to correct predictions is essential for AI interpretability and safety, yet existing evaluation protocols are limited to ambiguous language modeling tasks. To address this…
Consider a researcher estimating the parameters of a regression function based on data for all 50 states in the United States or on data for all visits to a website. What is the interpretation of the estimated parameters and the standard…
Updating machine learning models with new information usually improves their predictive performance, yet, in many applications, it is also desirable to avoid changing the model predictions too much. This property is called stability. In…
Large language models excel at complex instructions yet struggle to deviate from their helpful assistant persona, as post-training instills strong priors that resist conflicting instructions. We introduce system prompt strength, a…
Mathematical models are used extensively for diverse tasks including analysis, optimization, and decision making. Frequently, those models are principled but imperfect representations of reality. This is either due to incomplete physical…
Accurate and robust trajectory predictions of road users are needed to enable safe automated driving. To do this, machine learning models are often used, which can show erratic behavior when presented with previously unseen inputs. In this…
Modern AI models contain much of human knowledge, yet understanding of their internal representation of this knowledge remains elusive. Characterizing the structure and properties of this representation will lead to improvements in model…
In this paper, we study the possibility of designing non-trivial random CSP models by exploiting the intrinsic connection between structures and typical-case hardness. We show that constraint consistency, a notion that has been developed to…
So-called implicit behavioral cloning with energy-based models has shown promising results in robotic manipulation tasks. We tested if the method's advantages carry on to controlling the steering of a real self-driving car with an…
Reliable robotic manipulation requires control policies that can accurately represent and adapt to uncertainty arising from contact-rich interactions. Modern data-driven methods mitigate uncertainty through large-scale training and…
Robustness is a basic property of any control system. In the context of linear output regulation, it was proved that embedding an internal model of the exogenous signals is necessary and sufficient to achieve tracking of the desired…