author
Chief Scientist
,
Snorkel AI
Assistant Professor @ University of Wisconsin-Madison
Frederic Sala is Chief Scientist at Snorkel AI and an assistant professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research studies the fundamentals of data-driven systems and machine learning, with a focus on data-centric AI, foundation models, and automated machine learning. He and his group received the 2024 DARPA Young Faculty Award, a best student paper runner-up award at UAI ’22, the outstanding Ph.D. dissertation award from the UCLA Department of Electrical Engineering, the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.
The latest from Fred
Blog
Walking safely before building flying saucer seatbelts: introducing Enterprise Alignment
Snorkel takes a step on the path to enterprise superalignment with new data development workflows for enterprise alignment
Blog
How Skill-it! enables faster, better LLM training
Humans learn tasks better when taught in a logical order. So do LLMs. Researchers developed a way to exploit this tendency called “Skill-it!”
Promises and Pitfalls of Threshold-based Auto-labeling
Creating large-scale high-quality labeled datasets is a major bottleneck in supervised machine learning workflows. Threshold-based auto-labeling (TBAL), where validation data obtained from humans is used to find a confidence threshold above which the data is machine-labeled, reduces reliance on manual annotation. TBAL is emerging as a widely-used solution in practice. Given the long shelf-life and diverse usage of the resulting datasets, understanding when the data obtained by such auto-labeling systems can be relied on is crucial. This is the first work to analyze TBAL systems and derive sample complexity bounds on the amount of human-labeled validation data required for guaranteeing...
Research Paper
Promises and Pitfalls of Threshold-based Auto-labeling
Creating large-scale high-quality labeled datasets is a major bottleneck in supervised machine learning workflows. Threshold-based auto-labeling (TBAL), where validation data obtained from humans is used to find a confidence threshold above which the data is machine-labeled, reduces reliance on manual annotation. TBAL is emerging as a widely-used solution in practice. Given the long shelf-life and diverse usage of the resulting…
The Credential is Not Enough: Deception with Honeypots and Fake Credentials
Honeypots are a classic cyber-deceptive technique that allows a defender to add false information into the system in an effort to deter/delay/distract potential attackers. However, the effectiveness of honeypots is dependent on their design along with the environment into which they are deployed. In this work, we consider the scenario where there is a collection of honeypots along with a set of fake credentials. In the first part of the paper, we uncover fundamental bounds that relate to how long these deceptive elements remain effective. In the second part of the paper, we take our results one step further and...
Research Paper
The Credential is Not Enough: Deception with Honeypots and Fake Credentials
Honeypots are a classic cyber-deceptive technique that allows a defender to add false information into the system in an effort to deter/delay/distract potential attackers. However, the effectiveness of honeypots is dependent on their design along with the environment into which they are deployed. In this work, we consider the scenario where there is a collection of honeypots along with a…
Train ‘n Trade: Foundations of Parameter Markets
Organizations typically train large models individually. This is costly and time-consuming, particularly for large-scale foundation models. Such vertical production is known to be suboptimal. Inspired by this economic insight, we ask whether it is possible to leverage others’ expertise by trading the constituent parts in models, i.e., sets of weights, as if they were market commodities. While recent advances in aligning and interpolating models suggest that doing so may be possible, a number of fundamental questions must be answered to create viable parameter markets. In this work, we address these basic questions, propose a framework containing the infrastructure necessary for...
Research Paper
Train ‘n Trade: Foundations of Parameter Markets
Organizations typically train large models individually. This is costly and time-consuming, particularly for large-scale foundation models. Such vertical production is known to be suboptimal. Inspired by this economic insight, we ask whether it is possible to leverage others’ expertise by trading the constituent parts in models, i.e., sets of weights, as if they were market commodities. While recent advances in…
The Cost of Compression: Investigating the Impact of Compression on Parametric Knowledge in Language Models
Compressing large language models (LLMs), often consisting of billions of parameters, provides faster inference, smaller memory footprints, and enables local deployment. Two standard compression techniques are pruning and quantization, with the former eliminating redundant connections in model layers and the latter representing model parameters with fewer bits. The key tradeoff is between the degree of compression and the impact on the quality of the compressed model. Existing research on LLM compression primarily focuses on performance in terms of general metrics like perplexity or downstream task accuracy. More fine-grained metrics, such as those measuring parametric knowledge, remain significantly underexplored. To help...
Research Paper
The Cost of Compression: Investigating the Impact of Compression on Parametric Knowledge in Language Models
Compressing large language models (LLMs), often consisting of billions of parameters, provides faster inference, smaller memory footprints, and enables local deployment. Two standard compression techniques are pruning and quantization, with the former eliminating redundant connections in model layers and the latter representing model parameters with fewer bits. The key tradeoff is between the degree of compression and the impact on…
Zero-Shot Robustification of Zero-Shot Models with Foundation Models
Zero-shot inference is a powerful paradigm that enables the use of large pretrained models for downstream classification tasks without further training. However, these models are vulnerable to inherited biases that can impact their performance. The traditional solution is fine-tuning, but this undermines the key advantage of pretrained models, which is their ability to be used out-of-the-box. We propose ROBOSHOT, a method that improves the robustness of pretrained model embeddings in a fully zero-shot fashion. First, we use zero-shot language models (LMs) to obtain useful insights from task descriptions. These insights are embedded and used to remove harmful and boost useful...
Research Paper
Zero-Shot Robustification of Zero-Shot Models with Foundation Models
Zero-shot inference is a powerful paradigm that enables the use of large pretrained models for downstream classification tasks without further training. However, these models are vulnerable to inherited biases that can impact their performance. The traditional solution is fine-tuning, but this undermines the key advantage of pretrained models, which is their ability to be used out-of-the-box. We propose ROBOSHOT, a…
Skill-It! A data-driven skills framework for understanding and training language models
The quality of training data impacts the performance of pre-trained large language models (LMs). Given a fixed budget of tokens, we study how to best select data that leads to good downstream model performance across tasks. We develop a new framework based on a simple hypothesis: just as humans acquire interdependent skills in a deliberate order, language models also follow a natural order when learning a set of skills from their training data. If such an order exists, it can be utilized for improved understanding of LMs and for data-efficient training. Using this intuition, our framework formalizes the notion of...
Research Paper
Skill-It! A data-driven skills framework for understanding and training language models
The quality of training data impacts the performance of pre-trained large language models (LMs). Given a fixed budget of tokens, we study how to best select data that leads to good downstream model performance across tasks. We develop a new framework based on a simple hypothesis: just as humans acquire interdependent skills in a deliberate order, language models also follow…
Geometry Aware Adaptation for Pretrained Models
Machine learning models—including prominent zero-shot models—are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes—or, in the case of zero-shot prediction, to improve its performance—without any additional training. Our technique is a drop-in replacement of the standard prediction rule, swapping arg max with the Fréchet mean. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for this approach, studying (i) learning-theoretic...
Research Paper
Geometry Aware Adaptation for Pretrained Models
Machine learning models—including prominent zero-shot models—are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes—or, in the case…
