Portrait of Gintare Karolina Dziugaite

Gintare Karolina Dziugaite

Associate Industry Member
Adjunct Professor, McGill University, School of Computer Science
Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind
Research Topics
Deep Learning
Information Theory
Machine Learning Theory

Biography

Gintare Karolina Dziugaite is a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind in Toronto, and an adjunct professor at the McGill University School of Computer Science. Prior to joining Google, she led the Trustworthy AI program at Element AI (ServiceNow). Her research combines theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding deep learning.

Dziugaite is well known for her work on network and data sparsity, developing algorithms and uncovering effects on generalization and other metrics. She pioneered the study of linear mode connectivity, first connecting it to the existence of lottery tickets, then to loss landscapes and the mechanism of iterative magnitude pruning. Another major focus of her research is understanding generalization in deep learning and, more generally, the development of information-theoretic methods for studying generalization. Her most recent work looks at removing the influence of data on the model (unlearning).

Dziugaite obtained her PhD in machine learning from the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Zoubin Ghahramani. Prior to that, she studied mathematics at the University of Warwick and read Part III in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, receiving a Master of Advanced Study (MASt) in mathematics. She has participated in a number of long-term programs at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, and at the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of Berkeley.

Publications

Linear Weight Interpolation Leads to Transient Performance Gains
Robust Knowledge Unlearning via Mechanistic Localizations
Phillip Huang Guo
Aaquib Syed
Abhay Sheshadri
Aidan Ewart
Mixture of Experts in a Mixture of RL settings
Timon Willi
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
Mixtures of Experts (MoEs) have gained prominence in (self-)supervised learning due to their enhanced inference efficiency, adaptability to … (see more)distributed training, and modularity. Previous research has illustrated that MoEs can significantly boost Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) performance by expanding the network's parameter count while reducing dormant neurons, thereby enhancing the model's learning capacity and ability to deal with non-stationarity. In this work, we shed more light on MoEs' ability to deal with non-stationarity and investigate MoEs in DRL settings with"amplified"non-stationarity via multi-task training, providing further evidence that MoEs improve learning capacity. In contrast to previous work, our multi-task results allow us to better understand the underlying causes for the beneficial effect of MoE in DRL training, the impact of the various MoE components, and insights into how best to incorporate them in actor-critic-based DRL networks. Finally, we also confirm results from previous work.
Robust Unlearning via Mechanistic Localizations
Phillip Huang Guo
Aaquib Syed
Abhay Sheshadri
Aidan Ewart
Methods for machine unlearning in large language models seek to remove undesirable knowledge or capabilities without compromising general la… (see more)nguage modeling performance. This work investigates the use of mechanistic interpretability to improve the precision and effectiveness of unlearning. We demonstrate that localizing unlearning to components with particular mechanisms in factual recall leads to more robust unlearning across different input/output formats, relearning, and latent knowledge, and reduces unintended side effects compared to nonlocalized unlearning. Additionally, we analyze the strengths and weaknesses of different automated (rather than manual) interpretability methods for guiding unlearning, finding that their corresponding unlearned models require smaller edit sizes to achieve unlearning but are much less robust.
Linear Weight Interpolation Leads to Transient Performance Gains
Are we making progress in unlearning? Findings from the first NeurIPS unlearning competition
Eleni Triantafillou
Peter Kairouz
Fabian Pedregosa
Jamie Hayes
Meghdad Kurmanji
Kairan Zhao
Vincent Dumoulin
Julio C. S. Jacques Junior
Jun Wan
Lisheng Sun-Hosoya
Sergio Escalera
Peter Triantafillou
Isabelle Guyon
We present the findings of the first NeurIPS competition on unlearning, which sought to stimulate the development of novel algorithms and in… (see more)itiate discussions on formal and robust evaluation methodologies. The competition was highly successful: nearly 1,200 teams from across the world participated, and a wealth of novel, imaginative solutions with different characteristics were contributed. In this paper, we analyze top solutions and delve into discussions on benchmarking unlearning, which itself is a research problem. The evaluation methodology we developed for the competition measures forgetting quality according to a formal notion of unlearning, while incorporating model utility for a holistic evaluation. We analyze the effectiveness of different instantiations of this evaluation framework vis-a-vis the associated compute cost, and discuss implications for standardizing evaluation. We find that the ranking of leading methods remains stable under several variations of this framework, pointing to avenues for reducing the cost of evaluation. Overall, our findings indicate progress in unlearning, with top-performing competition entries surpassing existing algorithms under our evaluation framework. We analyze trade-offs made by different algorithms and strengths or weaknesses in terms of generalizability to new datasets, paving the way for advancing both benchmarking and algorithm development in this important area.
Data Selection for Transfer Unlearning
Nazanin Mohammadi Sepahvand
Vincent Dumoulin
Eleni Triantafillou
Unmasking Efficiency: Learning Salient Sparse Models in Non-IID Federated Learning
Riyasat Ohib
Bishal Thapaliya
Jingyu Liu 0001
Vince D. Calhoun
Sergey M. Plis
In this work, we propose Salient Sparse Federated Learning (SSFL), a streamlined approach for sparse federated learning with efficient commu… (see more)nication. SSFL identifies a sparse subnetwork prior to training, leveraging parameter saliency scores computed separately on local client data in non-IID scenarios, and then aggregated, to determine a global mask. Only the sparse model weights are communicated each round between the clients and the server. We validate SSFL's effectiveness using standard non-IID benchmarks, noting marked improvements in the sparsity--accuracy trade-offs. Finally, we deploy our method in a real-world federated learning framework and report improvement in communication time.
Information Complexity of Stochastic Convex Optimization: Applications to Generalization and Memorization
Idan Attias
MAHDI HAGHIFAM
Roi Livni
Daniel M. Roy
In this work, we investigate the interplay between memorization and learning in the context of \emph{stochastic convex optimization} (SCO). … (see more)We define memorization via the information a learning algorithm reveals about its training data points. We then quantify this information using the framework of conditional mutual information (CMI) proposed by Steinke and Zakynthinou (2020). Our main result is a precise characterization of the tradeoff between the accuracy of a learning algorithm and its CMI, answering an open question posed by Livni (2023). We show that, in the
Mixtures of Experts Unlock Parameter Scaling for Deep RL
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
Ghada Sokar
Timon Willi
Clare Lyle
Jesse Farebrother
Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
The recent rapid progress in (self) supervised learning models is in large part predicted by empirical scaling laws: a model's performance s… (see more)cales proportionally to its size. Analogous scaling laws remain elusive for reinforcement learning domains, however, where increasing the parameter count of a model often hurts its final performance. In this paper, we demonstrate that incorporating Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) modules, and in particular Soft MoEs (Puigcerver et al., 2023), into value-based networks results in more parameter-scalable models, evidenced by substantial performance increases across a variety of training regimes and model sizes. This work thus provides strong empirical evidence towards developing scaling laws for reinforcement learning.
Identifying Spurious Biases Early in Training through the Lens of Simplicity Bias
Yu Yang
Eric Gan
Baharan Mirzasoleiman
Neural networks trained with (stochastic) gradient descent have an inductive bias towards learning simpler solutions. This makes them highly… (see more) prone to learning spurious correlations in the training data, that may not hold at test time. In this work, we provide the first theoretical analysis of the effect of simplicity bias on learning spurious correlations. Notably, we show that examples with spurious features are provably separable based on the model's output early in training. We further illustrate that if spurious features have a small enough noise-to-signal ratio, the network's output on the majority of examples is almost exclusively determined by the spurious features, leading to poor worst-group test accuracy. Finally, we propose SPARE, which identifies spurious correlations early in training and utilizes importance sampling to alleviate their effect. Empirically, we demonstrate that SPARE outperforms state-of-the-art methods by up to 21.1% in worst-group accuracy, while being up to 12x faster. We also show that SPARE is a highly effective but lightweight method to discover spurious correlations.
Evaluating Interventional Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models
Numerous decision-making tasks require estimating causal effects under interventions on different parts of a system. As practitioners consid… (see more)er using large language models (LLMs) to automate decisions, studying their causal reasoning capabilities becomes crucial. A recent line of work evaluates LLMs ability to retrieve commonsense causal facts, but these evaluations do not sufficiently assess how LLMs reason about interventions. Motivated by the role that interventions play in causal inference, in this paper, we conduct empirical analyses to evaluate whether LLMs can accurately update their knowledge of a data-generating process in response to an intervention. We create benchmarks that span diverse causal graphs (e.g., confounding, mediation) and variable types, and enable a study of intervention-based reasoning. These benchmarks allow us to isolate the ability of LLMs to accurately predict changes resulting from their ability to memorize facts or find other shortcuts. Our analysis on four LLMs highlights that while GPT- 4 models show promising accuracy at predicting the intervention effects, they remain sensitive to distracting factors in the prompts.