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Researcher profile

Mehrdad Farajtabar

Mehrdad Farajtabar contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

ResearcherAffiliation not importedOpen to collaborate
Machine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputer VisionNeural and Evolutionary ComputingComputation and Language

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

TIDE: Every Layer Knows the Token Beneath the Context

We revisit a universally accepted but under-examined design choice in every modern LLM: a token index is looked up once at the input embedding layer and then permanently discarded. This single-injection assumption induces two structural failures: (i) the Rare Token Problem, where a Zipf-type distribution of vocabulary causes rare-token embeddings are chronically under-trained due to receiving a fraction of the cumulative gradient signal compared to common tokens; and (ii) the Contextual Collapse Problem, where limited parameters models map distributionally similar tokens to indistinguishable hidden states. As an attempt to address both, we propose TIDE, which augments the standard transformer with EmbeddingMemory: an ensemble of K independent MemoryBlocks that map token indices to context-free semantic vectors, computed once and injected into every layer through a depth-conditioned softmax router with a learnable null bank. We theoretically and empirically establish the benefits of TIDE in addressing the issues associated with single-token identity injection as well as improve performance across multiple language modeling and downstream tasks.

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preprint2026arXiv

Unmasking On-Policy Distillation: Where It Helps, Where It Hurts, and Why

On-policy distillation offers dense, per-token supervision for training reasoning models; however, it remains unclear under which conditions this signal is beneficial and under which it is detrimental. Which teacher model should be used, and in the case of self-distillation, which specific context should serve as the supervisory signal? Does the optimal choice vary from one token to the next? At present, addressing these questions typically requires costly training runs whose aggregate performance metrics obscure the dynamics at the level of individual tokens. We introduce a training-free diagnostic framework that operates at the highest resolution: per token, per question, and per teacher. We derive an ideal per-node gradient defined as the parameter update that maximally increases the student's probability of success. We then develop a scalable targeted-rollout algorithm to estimate this gradient efficiently, even for long chains of intermediate thoughts. The gradient alignment score, defined as the cosine similarity between this ideal gradient and any given distillation gradient, quantifies the extent to which a particular configuration approximates the ideal signal. Across a range of self-distillation settings and external teacher models, we observe that distillation guidance exhibits substantially higher alignment with the ideal on incorrect rollouts than on correct ones, where the student already performs well and the teacher's signal tends to become noisy. Furthermore, we find that the optimal distillation context depends jointly on the student model's capacity and the target task, and that no single universally effective configuration emerges. These findings motivate the use of per-task, per-token diagnostic analyses for distillation.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2022arXiv

An Empirical Study of Implicit Regularization in Deep Offline RL

Deep neural networks are the most commonly used function approximators in offline reinforcement learning. Prior works have shown that neural nets trained with TD-learning and gradient descent can exhibit implicit regularization that can be characterized by under-parameterization of these networks. Specifically, the rank of the penultimate feature layer, also called \textit{effective rank}, has been observed to drastically collapse during the training. In turn, this collapse has been argued to reduce the model's ability to further adapt in later stages of learning, leading to the diminished final performance. Such an association between the effective rank and performance makes effective rank compelling for offline RL, primarily for offline policy evaluation. In this work, we conduct a careful empirical study on the relation between effective rank and performance on three offline RL datasets : bsuite, Atari, and DeepMind lab. We observe that a direct association exists only in restricted settings and disappears in the more extensive hyperparameter sweeps. Also, we empirically identify three phases of learning that explain the impact of implicit regularization on the learning dynamics and found that bootstrapping alone is insufficient to explain the collapse of the effective rank. Further, we show that several other factors could confound the relationship between effective rank and performance and conclude that studying this association under simplistic assumptions could be highly misleading.

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preprint2022arXiv

Architecture Matters in Continual Learning

A large body of research in continual learning is devoted to overcoming the catastrophic forgetting of neural networks by designing new algorithms that are robust to the distribution shifts. However, the majority of these works are strictly focused on the "algorithmic" part of continual learning for a "fixed neural network architecture", and the implications of using different architectures are mostly neglected. Even the few existing continual learning methods that modify the model assume a fixed architecture and aim to develop an algorithm that efficiently uses the model throughout the learning experience. However, in this work, we show that the choice of architecture can significantly impact the continual learning performance, and different architectures lead to different trade-offs between the ability to remember previous tasks and learning new ones. Moreover, we study the impact of various architectural decisions, and our findings entail best practices and recommendations that can improve the continual learning performance.

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preprint2022arXiv

Wide Neural Networks Forget Less Catastrophically

A primary focus area in continual learning research is alleviating the "catastrophic forgetting" problem in neural networks by designing new algorithms that are more robust to the distribution shifts. While the recent progress in continual learning literature is encouraging, our understanding of what properties of neural networks contribute to catastrophic forgetting is still limited. To address this, instead of focusing on continual learning algorithms, in this work, we focus on the model itself and study the impact of "width" of the neural network architecture on catastrophic forgetting, and show that width has a surprisingly significant effect on forgetting. To explain this effect, we study the learning dynamics of the network from various perspectives such as gradient orthogonality, sparsity, and lazy training regime. We provide potential explanations that are consistent with the empirical results across different architectures and continual learning benchmarks.

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preprint2021arXiv

Optimization and Generalization of Regularization-Based Continual Learning: a Loss Approximation Viewpoint

Neural networks have achieved remarkable success in many cognitive tasks. However, when they are trained sequentially on multiple tasks without access to old data, their performance on early tasks tend to drop significantly. This problem is often referred to as catastrophic forgetting, a key challenge in continual learning of neural networks. The regularization-based approach is one of the primary classes of methods to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we provide a novel viewpoint of regularization-based continual learning by formulating it as a second-order Taylor approximation of the loss function of each task. This viewpoint leads to a unified framework that can be instantiated to derive many existing algorithms such as Elastic Weight Consolidation and Kronecker factored Laplace approximation. Based on this viewpoint, we study the optimization aspects (i.e., convergence) as well as generalization properties (i.e., finite-sample guarantees) of regularization-based continual learning. Our theoretical results indicate the importance of accurate approximation of the Hessian matrix. The experimental results on several benchmarks provide empirical validation of our theoretical findings.

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preprint2020arXiv

A maximum-entropy approach to off-policy evaluation in average-reward MDPs

This work focuses on off-policy evaluation (OPE) with function approximation in infinite-horizon undiscounted Markov decision processes (MDPs). For MDPs that are ergodic and linear (i.e. where rewards and dynamics are linear in some known features), we provide the first finite-sample OPE error bound, extending existing results beyond the episodic and discounted cases. In a more general setting, when the feature dynamics are approximately linear and for arbitrary rewards, we propose a new approach for estimating stationary distributions with function approximation. We formulate this problem as finding the maximum-entropy distribution subject to matching feature expectations under empirical dynamics. We show that this results in an exponential-family distribution whose sufficient statistics are the features, paralleling maximum-entropy approaches in supervised learning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed OPE approaches in multiple environments.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Dropout as an Implicit Gating Mechanism For Continual Learning

In recent years, neural networks have demonstrated an outstanding ability to achieve complex learning tasks across various domains. However, they suffer from the "catastrophic forgetting" problem when they face a sequence of learning tasks, where they forget the old ones as they learn new tasks. This problem is also highly related to the "stability-plasticity dilemma". The more plastic the network, the easier it can learn new tasks, but the faster it also forgets previous ones. Conversely, a stable network cannot learn new tasks as fast as a very plastic network. However, it is more reliable to preserve the knowledge it has learned from the previous tasks. Several solutions have been proposed to overcome the forgetting problem by making the neural network parameters more stable, and some of them have mentioned the significance of dropout in continual learning. However, their relationship has not been sufficiently studied yet. In this paper, we investigate this relationship and show that a stable network with dropout learns a gating mechanism such that for different tasks, different paths of the network are active. Our experiments show that the stability achieved by this implicit gating plays a very critical role in leading to performance comparable to or better than other involved continual learning algorithms to overcome catastrophic forgetting.

0 citations0 reviewsNo code linkedOpen access
preprint2020arXiv

Understanding the Role of Training Regimes in Continual Learning

Catastrophic forgetting affects the training of neural networks, limiting their ability to learn multiple tasks sequentially. From the perspective of the well established plasticity-stability dilemma, neural networks tend to be overly plastic, lacking the stability necessary to prevent the forgetting of previous knowledge, which means that as learning progresses, networks tend to forget previously seen tasks. This phenomenon coined in the continual learning literature, has attracted much attention lately, and several families of approaches have been proposed with different degrees of success. However, there has been limited prior work extensively analyzing the impact that different training regimes -- learning rate, batch size, regularization method-- can have on forgetting. In this work, we depart from the typical approach of altering the learning algorithm to improve stability. Instead, we hypothesize that the geometrical properties of the local minima found for each task play an important role in the overall degree of forgetting. In particular, we study the effect of dropout, learning rate decay, and batch size, on forming training regimes that widen the tasks' local minima and consequently, on helping it not to forget catastrophically. Our study provides practical insights to improve stability via simple yet effective techniques that outperform alternative baselines.

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