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
Website
Google Scholar
LinkedIn

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

Improved Localized Machine Unlearning Through the Lens of Memorization
Reihaneh Torkzadehmahani
Reza Nasirigerdeh
Georgios Kaissis
Daniel Rueckert
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Eleni Triantafillou
Machine unlearning refers to removing the influence of a specified subset of training data from a machine learning model, efficiently, after… (see more) it has already been trained. This is important for key applications, including making the model more accurate by removing outdated, mislabeled, or poisoned data. In this work, we study localized unlearning, where the unlearning algorithm operates on a (small) identified subset of parameters. Drawing inspiration from the memorization literature, we propose an improved localization strategy that yields strong results when paired with existing unlearning algorithms. We also propose a new unlearning algorithm, Deletion by Example Localization (DEL), that resets the parameters deemed-to-be most critical according to our localization strategy, and then finetunes them. Our extensive experiments on different datasets, forget sets and metrics reveal that DEL sets a new state-of-the-art for unlearning metrics, against both localized and full-parameter methods, while modifying a small subset of parameters, and outperforms the state-of-the-art localized unlearning in terms of test accuracy too.
2024-12-03
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Unlearning in- vs. out-of-distribution data in LLMs under gradient-based method
Teodora Baluta
Pascal Lamblin
Daniel Tarlow
Fabian Pedregosa
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Machine unlearning aims to solve the problem of removing the influence of selected training examples from a learned model. Despite the incre… (see more)asing attention to this problem, it remains an open research question how to evaluate unlearning in large language models (LLMs), and what are the critical properties of the data to be unlearned that affect the quality and efficiency of unlearning. This work formalizes a metric to evaluate unlearning quality in generative models, and uses it to assess the trade-offs between unlearning quality and performance. We demonstrate that unlearning out-of-distribution examples requires more unlearning steps but overall presents a better trade-off overall. For in-distribution examples, however, we observe a rapid decay in performance as unlearning progresses. We further evaluate how example's memorization and difficulty affect unlearning under a classical gradient ascent-based approach.
2024-11-07
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Unlearning in- vs. out-of-distribution data in LLMs under gradient-based method
Teodora Baluta
Pascal Lamblin
Daniel Tarlow
Fabian Pedregosa
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Machine unlearning aims to solve the problem of removing the influence of selected training examples from a learned model. Despite the incre… (see more)asing attention to this problem, it remains an open research question how to evaluate unlearning in large language models (LLMs), and what are the critical properties of the data to be unlearned that affect the quality and efficiency of unlearning. This work formalizes a metric to evaluate unlearning quality in generative models, and uses it to assess the trade-offs between unlearning quality and performance. We demonstrate that unlearning out-of-distribution examples requires more unlearning steps but overall presents a better trade-off overall. For in-distribution examples, however, we observe a rapid decay in performance as unlearning progresses. We further evaluate how example's memorization and difficulty affect unlearning under a classical gradient ascent-based approach.
2024-11-07
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
The Non-Local Model Merging Problem: Permutation Symmetries and Variance Collapse
Ekansh Sharma
Daniel M. Roy
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Model merging aims to efficiently combine the weights of multiple expert models, each trained on a specific task, into a single multi-task m… (see more)odel, with strong performance across all tasks. When applied to all but the last layer of weights, existing methods -- such as Task Arithmetic, TIES-merging, and TALL mask merging -- work well to combine expert models obtained by fine-tuning a common foundation model, operating within a"local"neighborhood of the foundation model. This work explores the more challenging scenario of"non-local"merging, which we find arises when an expert model changes significantly during pretraining or where the expert models do not even share a common foundation model. We observe that standard merging techniques often fail to generalize effectively in this non-local setting, even when accounting for permutation symmetries using standard techniques. We identify that this failure is, in part, due to"variance collapse", a phenomenon identified also in the setting of linear mode connectivity by Jordan et al. (2023). To address this, we propose a multi-task technique to re-scale and shift the output activations of the merged model for each task, aligning its output statistics with those of the corresponding task-specific expert models. Our experiments demonstrate that this correction significantly improves the performance of various model merging approaches in non-local settings, providing a strong baseline for future research on this problem.
2024-10-16
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
The Non-Local Model Merging Problem: Permutation Symmetries and Variance Collapse
Ekansh Sharma
Daniel M. Roy
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
2024-10-16
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Unlearning in- vs. out-of-distribution data in LLMs under gradient-based methods
Teodora Baluta
Pascal Lamblin
Daniel Tarlow
Fabian Pedregosa
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Machine unlearning aims to solve the problem of removing the influence of selected training examples from a learned model. Despite the incre… (see more)asing attention to this problem, it remains an open research question how to evaluate unlearning in large language models (LLMs), and what are the critical properties of the data to be unlearned that affect the quality and efficiency of unlearning. This work formalizes a metric to evaluate unlearning quality in generative models, and uses it to assess the trade-offs between unlearning quality and performance. We demonstrate that unlearning out-of-distribution examples requires more unlearning steps but overall presents a better trade-off overall. For in-distribution examples, however, we observe a rapid decay in performance as unlearning progresses. We further evaluate how example's memorization and difficulty affect unlearning under a classical gradient ascent-based approach.
2024-10-12
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/SafeGenAi (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Evaluating Interventional Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models
Tejas Kasetty
Divyat Mahajan
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Alexandre Drouin
Dhanya Sridhar
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.
2024-10-10
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/CALM (poster)
doi.org
openreview.net
Robust Knowledge Unlearning via Mechanistic Localizations
Phillip Huang Guo
Aaquib Syed
Abhay Sheshadri
Aidan Ewart
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
2024-06-28
ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/NextGenAISafety (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Mixture of Experts in a Mixture of RL settings
Timon Willi
Johan Samir Obando Ceron
Jakob Nicolaus Foerster
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
Pablo Samuel Castro
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.
2024-06-26
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Robust Unlearning via Mechanistic Localizations
Phillip Huang Guo
Aaquib Syed
Abhay Sheshadri
Aidan Ewart
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
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.
2024-06-24
ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/MI (spotlight)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Robust Unlearning via Mechanistic Localizations
Phillip Huang Guo
Aaquib Syed
Abhay Sheshadri
Aidan Ewart
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
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.
2024-06-24
ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/MI (spotlight)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Linear Weight Interpolation Leads to Transient Performance Gains
Gaurav Iyer
Gintare Karolina Dziugaite
David Rolnick
2024-06-16
ICML.cc/2024/Workshop/HiLD (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net