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Tatsunori Hashimoto

Tatsunori Hashimoto contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

17 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

A Bitter Lesson for Data Filtering

We investigate data filtering for large model pretraining via new scaling studies that target the high compute, data-scarce regime. In spite of an apparently common belief that filtering data to include only high-quality information is essential, our experiments suggest that with enough compute, the best data filter is no data filter. We find that sufficiently trained large parameter models not only tolerate low-quality and distractor data, but in fact benefit from nominally ``poor'' data.

preprint2025arXiv

End-to-End Test-Time Training for Long Context

We formulate long-context language modeling as a problem in continual learning rather than architecture design. Under this formulation, we only use a standard architecture -- a Transformer with sliding-window attention. However, our model continues learning at test time via next-token prediction on the given context, compressing the context it reads into its weights. In addition, we improve the model's initialization for learning at test time via meta-learning at training time. Overall, our method, a form of Test-Time Training (TTT), is End-to-End (E2E) both at test time (via next-token prediction) and training time (via meta-learning), in contrast to previous forms. We conduct extensive experiments with a focus on scaling properties. In particular, for 3B models trained with 164B tokens, our method (TTT-E2E) scales with context length in the same way as Transformer with full attention, while others, such as Mamba 2 and Gated DeltaNet, do not. However, similar to RNNs, TTT-E2E has constant inference latency regardless of context length, making it 2.7 times faster than full attention for 128K context. Our code is publicly available.

preprint2024arXiv

Evaluating Self-Supervised Learning via Risk Decomposition

Self-supervised learning (SSL) pipelines differ in many design choices such as the architecture, augmentations, or pretraining data. Yet SSL is typically evaluated using a single metric: linear probing on ImageNet. This does not provide much insight into why or when a model is better, now how to improve it. To address this, we propose an SSL risk decomposition, which generalizes the classical supervised approximation-estimation decomposition by considering errors arising from the representation learning step. Our decomposition consists of four error components: approximation, representation usability, probe generalization, and encoder generalization. We provide efficient estimators for each component and use them to analyze the effect of 30 design choices on 169 SSL vision models evaluated on ImageNet. Our analysis gives valuable insights for designing and using SSL models. For example, it highlights the main sources of error and shows how to improve SSL in specific settings (full- vs few-shot) by trading off error components. All results and pretrained models are at https://github.com/YannDubs/SSL-Risk-Decomposition.

preprint2024arXiv

Learning to (Learn at Test Time)

We reformulate the problem of supervised learning as learning to learn with two nested loops (i.e. learning problems). The inner loop learns on each individual instance with self-supervision before final prediction. The outer loop learns the self-supervised task used by the inner loop, such that its final prediction improves. Our inner loop turns out to be equivalent to linear attention when the inner-loop learner is only a linear model, and to self-attention when it is a kernel estimator. For practical comparison with linear or self-attention layers, we replace each of them in a transformer with an inner loop, so our outer loop is equivalent to training the architecture. When each inner-loop learner is a neural network, our approach vastly outperforms transformers with linear attention on ImageNet from 224 x 224 raw pixels in both accuracy and FLOPs, while (regular) transformers cannot run.

preprint2023arXiv

Identifying and Mitigating the Security Risks of Generative AI

Every major technical invention resurfaces the dual-use dilemma -- the new technology has the potential to be used for good as well as for harm. Generative AI (GenAI) techniques, such as large language models (LLMs) and diffusion models, have shown remarkable capabilities (e.g., in-context learning, code-completion, and text-to-image generation and editing). However, GenAI can be used just as well by attackers to generate new attacks and increase the velocity and efficacy of existing attacks. This paper reports the findings of a workshop held at Google (co-organized by Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison) on the dual-use dilemma posed by GenAI. This paper is not meant to be comprehensive, but is rather an attempt to synthesize some of the interesting findings from the workshop. We discuss short-term and long-term goals for the community on this topic. We hope this paper provides both a launching point for a discussion on this important topic as well as interesting problems that the research community can work to address.

preprint2022arXiv

Approximate Selection with Guarantees using Proxies

Due to the falling costs of data acquisition and storage, researchers and industry analysts often want to find all instances of rare events in large datasets. For instance, scientists can cheaply capture thousands of hours of video, but are limited by the need to manually inspect long videos to identify relevant objects and events. To reduce this cost, recent work proposes to use cheap proxy models, such as image classifiers, to identify an approximate set of data points satisfying a data selection filter. Unfortunately, this recent work does not provide the statistical accuracy guarantees necessary in scientific and production settings. In this work, we introduce novel algorithms for approximate selection queries with statistical accuracy guarantees. Namely, given a limited number of exact identifications from an oracle, often a human or an expensive machine learning model, our algorithms meet a minimum precision or recall target with high probability. In contrast, existing approaches can catastrophically fail in satisfying these recall and precision targets. We show that our algorithms can improve query result quality by up to 30x for both the precision and recall targets in both real and synthetic datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Distributionally Robust Losses for Latent Covariate Mixtures

While modern large-scale datasets often consist of heterogeneous subpopulations -- for example, multiple demographic groups or multiple text corpora -- the standard practice of minimizing average loss fails to guarantee uniformly low losses across all subpopulations. We propose a convex procedure that controls the worst-case performance over all subpopulations of a given size. Our procedure comes with finite-sample (nonparametric) convergence guarantees on the worst-off subpopulation. Empirically, we observe on lexical similarity, wine quality, and recidivism prediction tasks that our worst-case procedure learns models that do well against unseen subpopulations.

preprint2022arXiv

Distributionally Robust Models with Parametric Likelihood Ratios

As machine learning models are deployed ever more broadly, it becomes increasingly important that they are not only able to perform well on their training distribution, but also yield accurate predictions when confronted with distribution shift. The Distributionally Robust Optimization (DRO) framework proposes to address this issue by training models to minimize their expected risk under a collection of distributions, to imitate test-time shifts. This is most commonly achieved by instance-level re-weighting of the training objective to emulate the likelihood ratio with possible test distributions, which allows for estimating their empirical risk via importance sampling (assuming that they are subpopulations of the training distribution). However, re-weighting schemes in the literature are usually limited due to the difficulty of keeping the optimization problem tractable and the complexity of enforcing normalization constraints. In this paper, we show that three simple ideas -- mini-batch level normalization, a KL penalty and simultaneous gradient updates -- allow us to train models with DRO using a broader class of parametric likelihood ratios. In a series of experiments on both image and text classification benchmarks, we find that models trained with the resulting parametric adversaries are consistently more robust to subpopulation shifts when compared to other DRO approaches, and that the method performs reliably well with little hyper-parameter tuning. Code to reproduce our experiments can be found at https://github.com/pmichel31415/P-DRO.

preprint2022arXiv

Extending the WILDS Benchmark for Unsupervised Adaptation

Machine learning systems deployed in the wild are often trained on a source distribution but deployed on a different target distribution. Unlabeled data can be a powerful point of leverage for mitigating these distribution shifts, as it is frequently much more available than labeled data and can often be obtained from distributions beyond the source distribution as well. However, existing distribution shift benchmarks with unlabeled data do not reflect the breadth of scenarios that arise in real-world applications. In this work, we present the WILDS 2.0 update, which extends 8 of the 10 datasets in the WILDS benchmark of distribution shifts to include curated unlabeled data that would be realistically obtainable in deployment. These datasets span a wide range of applications (from histology to wildlife conservation), tasks (classification, regression, and detection), and modalities (photos, satellite images, microscope slides, text, molecular graphs). The update maintains consistency with the original WILDS benchmark by using identical labeled training, validation, and test sets, as well as the evaluation metrics. On these datasets, we systematically benchmark state-of-the-art methods that leverage unlabeled data, including domain-invariant, self-training, and self-supervised methods, and show that their success on WILDS is limited. To facilitate method development and evaluation, we provide an open-source package that automates data loading and contains all of the model architectures and methods used in this paper. Code and leaderboards are available at https://wilds.stanford.edu.

preprint2022arXiv

Is a Caption Worth a Thousand Images? A Controlled Study for Representation Learning

The development of CLIP [Radford et al., 2021] has sparked a debate on whether language supervision can result in vision models with more transferable representations than traditional image-only methods. Our work studies this question through a carefully controlled comparison of two approaches in terms of their ability to learn representations that generalize to downstream classification tasks. We find that when the pre-training dataset meets certain criteria -- it is sufficiently large and contains descriptive captions with low variability -- image-only methods do not match CLIP's transfer performance, even when they are trained with more image data. However, contrary to what one might expect, there are practical settings in which these criteria are not met, wherein added supervision through captions is actually detrimental. Motivated by our findings, we devise simple prescriptions to enable CLIP to better leverage the language information present in existing pre-training datasets.

preprint2022arXiv

Is Importance Weighting Incompatible with Interpolating Classifiers?

Importance weighting is a classic technique to handle distribution shifts. However, prior work has presented strong empirical and theoretical evidence demonstrating that importance weights can have little to no effect on overparameterized neural networks. Is importance weighting truly incompatible with the training of overparameterized neural networks? Our paper answers this in the negative. We show that importance weighting fails not because of the overparameterization, but instead, as a result of using exponentially-tailed losses like the logistic or cross-entropy loss. As a remedy, we show that polynomially-tailed losses restore the effects of importance reweighting in correcting distribution shift in overparameterized models. We characterize the behavior of gradient descent on importance weighted polynomially-tailed losses with overparameterized linear models, and theoretically demonstrate the advantage of using polynomially-tailed losses in a label shift setting. Surprisingly, our theory shows that using weights that are obtained by exponentiating the classical unbiased importance weights can improve performance. Finally, we demonstrate the practical value of our analysis with neural network experiments on a subpopulation shift and a label shift dataset. When reweighted, our loss function can outperform reweighted cross-entropy by as much as 9% in test accuracy. Our loss function also gives test accuracies comparable to, or even exceeding, well-tuned state-of-the-art methods for correcting distribution shifts.

preprint2022arXiv

Jury Learning: Integrating Dissenting Voices into Machine Learning Models

Whose labels should a machine learning (ML) algorithm learn to emulate? For ML tasks ranging from online comment toxicity to misinformation detection to medical diagnosis, different groups in society may have irreconcilable disagreements about ground truth labels. Supervised ML today resolves these label disagreements implicitly using majority vote, which overrides minority groups' labels. We introduce jury learning, a supervised ML approach that resolves these disagreements explicitly through the metaphor of a jury: defining which people or groups, in what proportion, determine the classifier's prediction. For example, a jury learning model for online toxicity might centrally feature women and Black jurors, who are commonly targets of online harassment. To enable jury learning, we contribute a deep learning architecture that models every annotator in a dataset, samples from annotators' models to populate the jury, then runs inference to classify. Our architecture enables juries that dynamically adapt their composition, explore counterfactuals, and visualize dissent.

preprint2022arXiv

On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models

AI is undergoing a paradigm shift with the rise of models (e.g., BERT, DALL-E, GPT-3) that are trained on broad data at scale and are adaptable to a wide range of downstream tasks. We call these models foundation models to underscore their critically central yet incomplete character. This report provides a thorough account of the opportunities and risks of foundation models, ranging from their capabilities (e.g., language, vision, robotics, reasoning, human interaction) and technical principles(e.g., model architectures, training procedures, data, systems, security, evaluation, theory) to their applications (e.g., law, healthcare, education) and societal impact (e.g., inequity, misuse, economic and environmental impact, legal and ethical considerations). Though foundation models are based on standard deep learning and transfer learning, their scale results in new emergent capabilities,and their effectiveness across so many tasks incentivizes homogenization. Homogenization provides powerful leverage but demands caution, as the defects of the foundation model are inherited by all the adapted models downstream. Despite the impending widespread deployment of foundation models, we currently lack a clear understanding of how they work, when they fail, and what they are even capable of due to their emergent properties. To tackle these questions, we believe much of the critical research on foundation models will require deep interdisciplinary collaboration commensurate with their fundamentally sociotechnical nature.

preprint2022arXiv

Semantic Indexes for Machine Learning-based Queries over Unstructured Data

Unstructured data (e.g., video or text) is now commonly queried by using computationally expensive deep neural networks or human labelers to produce structured information, e.g., object types and positions in video. To accelerate queries, many recent systems (e.g., BlazeIt, NoScope, Tahoma, SUPG, etc.) train a query-specific proxy model to approximate a large target labelers (i.e., these expensive neural networks or human labelers). These models return proxy scores that are then used in query processing algorithms. Unfortunately, proxy models usually have to be trained per query and require large amounts of annotations from the target labelers. In this work, we develop an index (trainable semantic index, TASTI) that simultaneously removes the need for per-query proxies and is more efficient to construct than prior indexes. TASTI accomplishes this by leveraging semantic similarity across records in a given dataset. Specifically, it produces embeddings for each record such that records with close embeddings have similar target labeler outputs. TASTI then generates high-quality proxy scores via embeddings without needing to train a per-query proxy. These scores can be used in existing proxy-based query processing algorithms (e.g., for aggregation, selection, etc.). We theoretically analyze TASTI and show that a low embedding training error guarantees downstream query accuracy for a natural class of queries. We evaluate TASTI on five video, text, and speech datasets, and three query types. We show that TASTI's indexes can be 10$\times$ less expensive to construct than generating annotations for current proxy-based methods, and accelerate queries by up to 24$\times$.

preprint2022arXiv

Spurious Correlations in Reference-Free Evaluation of Text Generation

Model-based, reference-free evaluation metrics have been proposed as a fast and cost-effective approach to evaluate Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. Despite promising recent results, we find evidence that reference-free evaluation metrics of summarization and dialog generation may be relying on spurious correlations with measures such as word overlap, perplexity, and length. We further observe that for text summarization, these metrics have high error rates when ranking current state-of-the-art abstractive summarization systems. We demonstrate that these errors can be mitigated by explicitly designing evaluation metrics to avoid spurious features in reference-free evaluation.

preprint2020arXiv

Improved Natural Language Generation via Loss Truncation

Neural language models are usually trained to match the distributional properties of a large-scale corpus by minimizing the log loss. While straightforward to optimize, this approach forces the model to reproduce all variations in the dataset, including noisy and invalid references (e.g., misannotation and hallucinated facts). Worse, the commonly used log loss is overly sensitive to such phenomena and even a small fraction of noisy data can degrade performance. In this work, we show that the distinguishability of the models and reference serves as a principled and robust alternative for handling invalid references. To optimize distinguishability, we propose loss truncation, which adaptively removes high loss examples during training. We show this is as easy to optimize as log loss and tightly bounds distinguishability under noise. Empirically, we demonstrate that loss truncation outperforms existing baselines on distinguishability on a summarization task, and show that samples generated by the loss truncation model have factual accuracy ratings that exceed those of baselines and match human references.

preprint2020arXiv

Robustness to Spurious Correlations via Human Annotations

The reliability of machine learning systems critically assumes that the associations between features and labels remain similar between training and test distributions. However, unmeasured variables, such as confounders, break this assumption---useful correlations between features and labels at training time can become useless or even harmful at test time. For example, high obesity is generally predictive for heart disease, but this relation may not hold for smokers who generally have lower rates of obesity and higher rates of heart disease. We present a framework for making models robust to spurious correlations by leveraging humans' common sense knowledge of causality. Specifically, we use human annotation to augment each training example with a potential unmeasured variable (i.e. an underweight patient with heart disease may be a smoker), reducing the problem to a covariate shift problem. We then introduce a new distributionally robust optimization objective over unmeasured variables (UV-DRO) to control the worst-case loss over possible test-time shifts. Empirically, we show improvements of 5-10% on a digit recognition task confounded by rotation, and 1.5-5% on the task of analyzing NYPD Police Stops confounded by location.