Author name cluster

Roger Grosse

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

19 papers

1 author row

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Better Training Data Attribution via Better Inverse Hessian-Vector Products

Andrew Wang
Elisa Nguyen
Runshi Yang
Juhan Bae
Sheila McIlraith
Roger Grosse

Training data attribution (TDA) provides insights into which training data is responsible for a learned model behavior. Gradient-based TDA methods such as influence functions and unrolled differentiation both involve a computation that resembles an inverse Hessian-vector product (iHVP), which is difficult to approximate efficiently. We introduce an algorithm (ASTRA) which uses the EKFAC-preconditioner on Neumann series iterations to arrive at an accurate iHVP approximation for TDA. ASTRA is easy to tune, requires fewer iterations than Neumann series iterations, and is more accurate than EKFAC-based approximations. Using ASTRA, we show that improving the accuracy of the iHVP approximation can significantly improve TDA performance.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Distributional Training Data Attribution: What do Influence Functions Sample?

Bruno Mlodozeniec
Isaac Reid
Sam Power
David Krueger
Murat Erdogdu
Richard Turner
Roger Grosse

Randomness is an unavoidable part of training deep learning models, yet something that traditional training data attribution algorithms fail to rigorously account for. They ignore the fact that, due to stochasticity in the initialisation and batching, training on the same dataset can yield different models. In this paper, we address this shortcoming through introducing distributional training data attribution (d-TDA), the goal of which is to predict how the distribution of model outputs (over training runs) depends upon the dataset. Intriguingly, we find that influence functions (IFs), a popular data attribution tool, are 'secretly distributional': they emerge from our framework as the limit to unrolled differentiation, without requiring restrictive convexity assumptions. This provides a new perspective on the effectiveness of IFs in deep learning. We demonstrate the practical utility of d-TDA in experiments, including improving data pruning for vision transformers and identifying influential examples with diffusion models.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Reducing the Probability of Undesirable Outputs in Language Models Using Probabilistic Inference

Stephen Zhao
Aidan Li
Rob Brekelmans
Roger Grosse

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a predominant technique to align language models (LMs) with human preferences or promote outputs which are deemed to be desirable by a given reward function. Standard RL approaches optimize average reward, while methods explicitly focused on reducing the probability of undesired outputs typically come at a cost to average-case performance. To improve this tradeoff, we introduce RePULSe, a new training method that augments the standard RL loss with an additional loss that uses learned proposals to guide sampling low-reward outputs, and then reduces those outputs’ probability. We run experiments demonstrating that RePULSe produces a better tradeoff of expected reward versus the probability of undesired outputs and is more adversarially robust, compared to standard RL alignment approaches and alternatives.

NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

What is Your Data Worth to GPT? LLM-Scale Data Valuation with Influence Functions

Sang Choe
Hwijeen Ahn
Juhan Bae
Kewen Zhao
Youngseog Chung
Adithya Pratapa
Willie Neiswanger
Emma Strubell

Large language models (LLMs) are trained on a vast amount of human-written data, but data providers often remain uncredited. In response to this issue, data valuation (or data attribution), which quantifies the contribution or value of each data to the model output, has been discussed as a potential solution. Nevertheless, applying existing data valuation methods to recent LLMs and their vast training datasets has been largely limited by prohibitive compute and memory costs. In this work, we focus on influence functions, a popular gradient-based data valuation method, and significantly improve its scalability with an efficient gradient projection strategy called LoGra that leverages the gradient structure in backpropagation. We then provide a theoretical motivation of gradient projection approaches to influence functions to promote trust in the data valuation process. Lastly, we lower the barrier to implementing data valuation systems by introducing LogIX, a software package that can transform existing training code into data valuation code with minimal effort. In our data valuation experiments, LoGra achieves competitive accuracy against more expensive baselines while showing up to 6, 500x improvement in throughput and 5x reduction in GPU memory usage when applied to Llama3-8B-Instruct and the 1B-token dataset.

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Connecting the Dots: LLMs can Infer and Verbalize Latent Structure from Disparate Training Data

Johannes Treutlein
Dami Choi
Jan Betley
Sam Marks
Cem Anil
Roger Grosse
Owain Evans

One way to address safety risks from large language models (LLMs) is to censor dangerous knowledge from their training data. While this removes the explicit information, implicit information can remain scattered across various training documents. Could an LLM infer the censored knowledge by piecing together these implicit hints? As a step towards answering this question, we study inductive out-of-context reasoning (OOCR), a type of generalization in which LLMs infer latent information from evidence distributed across training documents and apply it to downstream tasks without in-context learning. Using a suite of five tasks, we demonstrate that frontier LLMs can perform inductive OOCR. In one experiment we finetune an LLM on a corpus consisting only of distances between an unknown city and other known cities. Remarkably, without in-context examples or Chain of Thought, the LLM can verbalize that the unknown city is Paris and use this fact to answer downstream questions. Further experiments show that LLMs trained only on individual coin flip outcomes can verbalize whether the coin is biased, and those trained only on pairs $(x, f(x))$ can articulate a definition of $f$ and compute inverses. While OOCR succeeds in a range of cases, we also show that it is unreliable, particularly for smaller LLMs learning complex structures. Overall, the ability of LLMs to "connect the dots" without explicit in-context learning poses a potential obstacle to monitoring and controlling the knowledge acquired by LLMs.

PDF Details DOI

NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Training Data Attribution via Approximate Unrolling

Juhan Bae
Wu Lin
Jonathan Lorraine
Roger Grosse

Many training data attribution (TDA) methods aim to estimate how a model's behavior would change if one or more data points were removed from the training set. Methods based on implicit differentiation, such as influence functions, can be made computationally efficient, but fail to account for underspecification, the implicit bias of the optimization algorithm, or multi-stage training pipelines. By contrast, methods based on unrolling address these issues but face scalability challenges. In this work, we connect the implicit-differentiation-based and unrolling-based approaches and combine their benefits by introducing Source, an approximate unrolling-based TDA method that is computed using an influence-function-like formula. While being computationally efficient compared to unrolling-based approaches, Source is suitable in cases where implicit-differentiation-based approaches struggle, such as in non-converged models and multi-stage training pipelines. Empirically, Source outperforms existing TDA techniques in counterfactual prediction, especially in settings where implicit-differentiation-based approaches fall short.

PDF Details DOI

JMLR Journal 2021 Journal Article

A Unified Analysis of First-Order Methods for Smooth Games via Integral Quadratic Constraints

Guodong Zhang
Xuchan Bao
Laurent Lessard
Roger Grosse

The theory of integral quadratic constraints (IQCs) allows the certification of exponential convergence of interconnected systems containing nonlinear or uncertain elements. In this work, we adapt the IQC theory to study first-order methods for smooth and strongly-monotone games and show how to design tailored quadratic constraints to get tight upper bounds of convergence rates. Using this framework, we recover the existing bound for the gradient method~(GD), derive sharper bounds for the proximal point method~(PPM) and optimistic gradient method~(OG), and provide for the first time a global convergence rate for the negative momentum method~(NM) with an iteration complexity $\mathcal{O}(\kappa^{1.5})$, which matches its known lower bound. In addition, for time-varying systems, we prove that the gradient method with optimal step size achieves the fastest provable worst-case convergence rate with quadratic Lyapunov functions. Finally, we further extend our analysis to stochastic games and study the impact of multiplicative noise on different algorithms. We show that it is impossible for an algorithm with one step of memory to achieve acceleration if it only queries the gradient once per batch (in contrast with the stochastic strongly-convex optimization setting, where such acceleration has been demonstrated). However, we exhibit an algorithm which achieves acceleration with two gradient queries per batch. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] [ code ] &copy JMLR 2021. ( edit, beta )

NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Don't Blame the ELBO! A Linear VAE Perspective on Posterior Collapse

James Lucas
George Tucker
Roger Grosse
Mohammad Norouzi

Posterior collapse in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) with uninformative priors arises when the variational posterior distribution closely matches the prior for a subset of latent variables. This paper presents a simple and intuitive explanation for posterior collapse through the analysis of linear VAEs and their direct correspondence with Probabilistic PCA (pPCA). We explain how posterior collapse may occur in pPCA due to local maxima in the log marginal likelihood. Unexpectedly, we prove that the ELBO objective for the linear VAE does not introduce additional spurious local maxima relative to log marginal likelihood. We show further that training a linear VAE with exact variational inference recovers a uniquely identifiable global maximum corresponding to the principal component directions. Empirically, we find that our linear analysis is predictive even for high-capacity, non-linear VAEs and helps explain the relationship between the observation noise, local maxima, and posterior collapse in deep Gaussian VAEs.

NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Fast Convergence of Natural Gradient Descent for Over-Parameterized Neural Networks

Guodong Zhang
James Martens
Roger Grosse

Natural gradient descent has proven very effective at mitigating the catastrophic effects of pathological curvature in the objective function, but little is known theoretically about its convergence properties, especially for \emph{non-linear} networks. In this work, we analyze for the first time the speed of convergence to global optimum for natural gradient descent on non-linear neural networks with the squared error loss. We identify two conditions which guarantee the global convergence: (1) the Jacobian matrix (of network's output for all training cases w. r. t the parameters) is full row rank and (2) the Jacobian matrix is stable for small perturbations around the initialization. For two-layer ReLU neural networks (i. e. with one hidden layer), we prove that these two conditions do hold throughout the training under the assumptions that the inputs do not degenerate and the network is over-parameterized. We further extend our analysis to more general loss function with similar convergence property. Lastly, we show that K-FAC, an approximate natural gradient descent method, also converges to global minima under the same assumptions.

NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Preventing Gradient Attenuation in Lipschitz Constrained Convolutional Networks

Qiyang Li
Saminul Haque
Cem Anil
James Lucas
Roger Grosse
Joern-Henrik Jacobsen

Lipschitz constraints under L2 norm on deep neural networks are useful for provable adversarial robustness bounds, stable training, and Wasserstein distance estimation. While heuristic approaches such as the gradient penalty have seen much practical success, it is challenging to achieve similar practical performance while provably enforcing a Lipschitz constraint. In principle, one can design Lipschitz constrained architectures using the composition property of Lipschitz functions, but Anil et al. recently identified a key obstacle to this approach: gradient norm attenuation. They showed how to circumvent this problem in the case of fully connected networks by designing each layer to be gradient norm preserving. We extend their approach to train scalable, expressive, provably Lipschitz convolutional networks. In particular, we present the Block Convolution Orthogonal Parameterization (BCOP), an expressive parameterization of orthogonal convolution operations. We show that even though the space of orthogonal convolutions is disconnected, the largest connected component of BCOP with 2n channels can represent arbitrary BCOP convolutions over n channels. Our BCOP parameterization allows us to train large convolutional networks with provable Lipschitz bounds. Empirically, we find that it is competitive with existing approaches to provable adversarial robustness and Wasserstein distance estimation.

NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Which Algorithmic Choices Matter at Which Batch Sizes? Insights From a Noisy Quadratic Model

Guodong Zhang
Lala Li
Zachary Nado
James Martens
Sushant Sachdeva
George Dahl
Chris Shallue
Roger Grosse

Increasing the batch size is a popular way to speed up neural network training, but beyond some critical batch size, larger batch sizes yield diminishing returns. In this work, we study how the critical batch size changes based on properties of the optimization algorithm, including acceleration and preconditioning, through two different lenses: large scale experiments and analysis using a simple noisy quadratic model (NQM). We experimentally demonstrate that optimization algorithms that employ preconditioning, specifically Adam and K-FAC, result in much larger critical batch sizes than stochastic gradient descent with momentum. We also demonstrate that the NQM captures many of the essential features of real neural network training, despite being drastically simpler to work with. The NQM predicts our results with preconditioned optimizers, previous results with accelerated gradient descent, and other results around optimal learning rates and large batch training, making it a useful tool to generate testable predictions about neural network optimization. We demonstrate empirically that the simple noisy quadratic model (NQM) displays many similarities to neural networks in terms of large-batch training. We prove analytical convergence results for the NQM model that predict such behavior and hence provide possible explanations and a better understanding for many large-batch training phenomena.

NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Isolating Sources of Disentanglement in Variational Autoencoders

Ricky T. Q. Chen
Xuechen Li
Roger Grosse
David Duvenaud

We decompose the evidence lower bound to show the existence of a term measuring the total correlation between latent variables. We use this to motivate the beta-TCVAE (Total Correlation Variational Autoencoder) algorithm, a refinement and plug-in replacement of the beta-VAE for learning disentangled representations, requiring no additional hyperparameters during training. We further propose a principled classifier-free measure of disentanglement called the mutual information gap (MIG). We perform extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments, in both restricted and non-restricted settings, and show a strong relation between total correlation and disentanglement, when the model is trained using our framework.

NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Reversible Recurrent Neural Networks

Matthew MacKay
Paul Vicol
Jimmy Ba
Roger Grosse

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) provide state-of-the-art performance in processing sequential data but are memory intensive to train, limiting the flexibility of RNN models which can be trained. Reversible RNNs---RNNs for which the hidden-to-hidden transition can be reversed---offer a path to reduce the memory requirements of training, as hidden states need not be stored and instead can be recomputed during backpropagation. We first show that perfectly reversible RNNs, which require no storage of the hidden activations, are fundamentally limited because they cannot forget information from their hidden state. We then provide a scheme for storing a small number of bits in order to allow perfect reversal with forgetting. Our method achieves comparable performance to traditional models while reducing the activation memory cost by a factor of 10--15. We extend our technique to attention-based sequence-to-sequence models, where it maintains performance while reducing activation memory cost by a factor of 5--10 in the encoder, and a factor of 10--15 in the decoder.

NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Scalable trust-region method for deep reinforcement learning using Kronecker-factored approximation

Yuhuai Wu
Elman Mansimov
Roger Grosse
Shun Liao
Jimmy Ba

In this work, we propose to apply trust region optimization to deep reinforcement learning using a recently proposed Kronecker-factored approximation to the curvature. We extend the framework of natural policy gradient and propose to optimize both the actor and the critic using Kronecker-factored approximate curvature (K-FAC) with trust region; hence we call our method Actor Critic using Kronecker-Factored Trust Region (ACKTR). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first scalable trust region natural gradient method for actor-critic methods. It is also the method that learns non-trivial tasks in continuous control as well as discrete control policies directly from raw pixel inputs. We tested our approach across discrete domains in Atari games as well as continuous domains in the MuJoCo environment. With the proposed methods, we are able to achieve higher rewards and a 2- to 3-fold improvement in sample efficiency on average, compared to previous state-of-the-art on-policy actor-critic methods. Code is available at https: //github. com/openai/baselines

NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

The Reversible Residual Network: Backpropagation Without Storing Activations

Aidan Gomez
Mengye Ren
Raquel Urtasun
Roger Grosse

Residual Networks (ResNets) have demonstrated significant improvement over traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on image classification, increasing in performance as networks grow both deeper and wider. However, memory consumption becomes a bottleneck as one needs to store all the intermediate activations for calculating gradients using backpropagation. In this work, we present the Reversible Residual Network (RevNet), a variant of ResNets where each layer's activations can be reconstructed exactly from the next layer's. Therefore, the activations for most layers need not be stored in memory during backprop. We demonstrate the effectiveness of RevNets on CIFAR and ImageNet, establishing nearly identical performance to equally-sized ResNets, with activation storage requirements independent of depth.

NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Measuring the reliability of MCMC inference with bidirectional Monte Carlo

Roger Grosse
Siddharth Ancha
Daniel Roy

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is one of the main workhorses of probabilistic inference, but it is notoriously hard to measure the quality of approximate posterior samples. This challenge is particularly salient in black box inference methods, which can hide details and obscure inference failures. In this work, we extend the recently introduced bidirectional Monte Carlo technique to evaluate MCMC-based posterior inference algorithms. By running annealed importance sampling (AIS) chains both from prior to posterior and vice versa on simulated data, we upper bound in expectation the symmetrized KL divergence between the true posterior distribution and the distribution of approximate samples. We integrate our method into two probabilistic programming languages, WebPPL and Stan, and validate it on several models and datasets. As an example of how our method be used to guide the design of inference algorithms, we apply it to study the effectiveness of different model representations in WebPPL and Stan.

NeurIPS Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Learning Wake-Sleep Recurrent Attention Models

Jimmy Ba
Russ Salakhutdinov
Roger Grosse
Brendan Frey

Despite their success, convolutional neural networks are computationally expensive because they must examine all image locations. Stochastic attention-based models have been shown to improve computational efficiency at test time, but they remain difficult to train because of intractable posterior inference and high variance in the stochastic gradient estimates. Borrowing techniques from the literature on training deep generative models, we present the Wake-Sleep Recurrent Attention Model, a method for training stochastic attention networks which improves posterior inference and which reduces the variability in the stochastic gradients. We show that our method can greatly speed up the training time for stochastic attention networks in the domains of image classification and caption generation.

AAAI Conference 2014 Conference Paper

Automatic Construction and Natural-Language Description of Nonparametric Regression Models

James Lloyd
David Duvenaud
Roger Grosse
Joshua Tenenbaum
Zoubin Ghahramani

This paper presents the beginnings of an automatic statistician, focusing on regression problems. Our system explores an open-ended space of statistical models to discover a good explanation of a data set, and then produces a detailed report with figures and naturallanguage text. Our approach treats unknown regression functions nonparametrically using Gaussian processes, which has two important consequences. First, Gaussian processes can model functions in terms of high-level properties (e. g. smoothness, trends, periodicity, changepoints). Taken together with the compositional structure of our language of models this allows us to automatically describe functions in simple terms. Second, the use of flexible nonparametric models and a rich language for composing them in an open-ended manner also results in stateof-the-art extrapolation performance evaluated over 13 real time series data sets from various domains.

NeurIPS Conference 2013 Conference Paper

Annealing between distributions by averaging moments

Roger Grosse
Chris Maddison
Russ Salakhutdinov

Many powerful Monte Carlo techniques for estimating partition functions, such as annealed importance sampling (AIS), are based on sampling from a sequence of intermediate distributions which interpolate between a tractable initial distribution and an intractable target distribution. The near-universal practice is to use geometric averages of the initial and target distributions, but alternative paths can perform substantially better. We present a novel sequence of intermediate distributions for exponential families: averaging the moments of the initial and target distributions. We derive an asymptotically optimal piecewise linear schedule for the moments path and show that it performs at least as well as geometric averages with a linear schedule. Moment averaging performs well empirically at estimating partition functions of restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), which form the building blocks of many deep learning models, including Deep Belief Networks and Deep Boltzmann Machines.