Researcher profile

Saeid Asgari Taghanaki

Saeid Asgari Taghanaki contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

4 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Diagnosing Capability Gaps in Fine-Tuning Data

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for domain-specific tasks requires training datasets that comprehensively cover the target capabilities a practitioner needs. Yet identifying which capabilities a dataset fails to support, and doing so before an expensive fine-tuning run, remains a largely unsolved problem. We introduce GoalCover, a framework that helps practitioners systematically detect capability gaps in fine-tuning datasets through interactive goal decomposition and automated coverage assessment. GoalCover guides a practitioner through structured decomposition of a high-level goal into atomic, independently evaluable subgoals; assigns each training sample an LLM-based alignment score against every subgoal; and surfaces missing capabilities through automated analysis of low-scoring sample explanations. We validate the framework along two complementary axes. First, through controlled corruption experiments across three domains (medical QA, legal summarization, code generation), we show that GoalCover reliably distinguishes targeted from non-targeted capability impacts: target subgoals degrade by 25.6% on average versus 2.1% for non-target subgoals (Cohen's d=1.24). Second, we demonstrate downstream utility on a financial-summarization Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) task with Qwen-3-14B: training on GoalCover-filtered data improves the LLM-judge reward from 3.77 to 4.12 (out of 5) over the unfiltered baseline, and combining filtered data with goal-conditioned synthetic samples yields the strongest result (4.20). The two results together show that GoalCover works as a practical pre-fine-tuning diagnostic: it detects capability gaps and produces concrete signal for closing them.

preprint2022arXiv

Counterbalancing Teacher: Regularizing Batch Normalized Models for Robustness

Batch normalization (BN) is a ubiquitous technique for training deep neural networks that accelerates their convergence to reach higher accuracy. However, we demonstrate that BN comes with a fundamental drawback: it incentivizes the model to rely on low-variance features that are highly specific to the training (in-domain) data, hurting generalization performance on out-of-domain examples. In this work, we investigate this phenomenon by first showing that removing BN layers across a wide range of architectures leads to lower out-of-domain and corruption errors at the cost of higher in-domain errors. We then propose Counterbalancing Teacher (CT), a method which leverages a frozen copy of the same model without BN as a teacher to enforce the student network's learning of robust representations by substantially adapting its weights through a consistency loss function. This regularization signal helps CT perform well in unforeseen data shifts, even without information from the target domain as in prior works. We theoretically show in an overparameterized linear regression setting why normalization leads to a model's reliance on such in-domain features, and empirically demonstrate the efficacy of CT by outperforming several baselines on robustness benchmarks such as CIFAR-10-C, CIFAR-100-C, and VLCS.

preprint2020arXiv

Jigsaw-VAE: Towards Balancing Features in Variational Autoencoders

The latent variables learned by VAEs have seen considerable interest as an unsupervised way of extracting features, which can then be used for downstream tasks. There is a growing interest in the question of whether features learned on one environment will generalize across different environments. We demonstrate here that VAE latent variables often focus on some factors of variation at the expense of others - in this case we refer to the features as ``imbalanced''. Feature imbalance leads to poor generalization when the latent variables are used in an environment where the presence of features changes. Similarly, latent variables trained with imbalanced features induce the VAE to generate less diverse (i.e. biased towards dominant features) samples. To address this, we propose a regularization scheme for VAEs, which we show substantially addresses the feature imbalance problem. We also introduce a simple metric to measure the balance of features in generated images.

preprint2020arXiv

PointMask: Towards Interpretable and Bias-Resilient Point Cloud Processing

Deep classifiers tend to associate a few discriminative input variables with their objective function, which in turn, may hurt their generalization capabilities. To address this, one can design systematic experiments and/or inspect the models via interpretability methods. In this paper, we investigate both of these strategies on deep models operating on point clouds. We propose PointMask, a model-agnostic interpretable information-bottleneck approach for attribution in point cloud models. PointMask encourages exploring the majority of variation factors in the input space while gradually converging to a general solution. More specifically, PointMask introduces a regularization term that minimizes the mutual information between the input and the latent features used to masks out irrelevant variables. We show that coupling a PointMask layer with an arbitrary model can discern the points in the input space which contribute the most to the prediction score, thereby leading to interpretability. Through designed bias experiments, we also show that thanks to its gradual masking feature, our proposed method is effective in handling data bias.