Dimitris Tsipras: Opening the black box of deep learning models

This talk was held on October 20, 2023 as a part of the MLFL series, hosted by the Center for Data Science, UMass Amherst.

Abstract of the Talk:
Modern machine learning is powered by a simple recipe: train large models on vast datasets. But while these models can be potent, a lot remains to be understood about how they actually work. In this talk, I will demonstrate how probing some of the striking successes and failures of these models can allow us to peek inside the black box. First, I will look at the phenomenon of adversarial examples—highly accurate models are severely brittle to imperceptible perturbations. I will discuss findings that shed light into the origins of this phenomenon and their implications for learning in general. Then, I will focus on the emergent capability of in-context learning—large language models are able to adapt to new tasks on-the-fly, by conditioning on a few input-output examples. I will present a methodology that allows us to rigorously study this capability and probe its limits. Overall, these explorations exemplify how we can understand a lot about the inner workings of these models by dissecting their behavior outside typical conditions.

About the Speaker:
Dimitris Tsipras is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, advised by Percy Liang and Greg Valiant. He obtained his PhD from MIT, advised by Aleksander Madry. His research is aimed towards understanding and improving the modern machine learning toolkit, focusing on topics such as reliability, benchmarks, and interpretability.

About Machine Learning and Friends Lunch:

MLFL is a lively and interactive forum held weekly where friends of the UMass Amherst machine learning community can sit down, have lunch, and give or hear a 50-minute presentation on recent machine learning research.
This semester of the UMass MLFL series has been graciously sponsored by our friends at Oracle Labs.

Please follow this link to know more about the past and upcoming talks: http://umass-mlfl.github.io