Unlocking High-Accuracy Differentially Private Image Classification through Scale

According to empirical evidence from prior works, utility degradation in DP-SGD becomes more severe on larger neural network models – including the ones regularly used to achieve the best performance on challenging image classification benchmarks. Our work investigates this phenomenon and proposes a series of simple modifications to both the training procedure and model architecture, yielding a significant improvement on the accuracy of DP training on standard image classification benchmarks.Read More

Dynamic language understanding: adaptation to new knowledge in parametric and semi-parametric models

To study how semi-parametric QA models and their underlying parametric language models (LMs) adapt to evolving knowledge, we construct a new large-scale dataset, StreamingQA, with human written and generated questions asked on a given date, to be answered from 14 years of time-stamped news articles. We evaluate our models quarterly as they read new articles not seen in pre-training. We show that parametric models can be updated without full retraining, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting.Read More

Dynamic language understanding: adaptation to new knowledge in parametric and semi-parametric models

To study how semi-parametric QA models and their underlying parametric language models (LMs) adapt to evolving knowledge, we construct a new large-scale dataset, StreamingQA, with human written and generated questions asked on a given date, to be answered from 14 years of time-stamped news articles. We evaluate our models quarterly as they read new articles not seen in pre-training. We show that parametric models can be updated without full retraining, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting.Read More

Kyrgyzstan to King’s Cross: the star baker cooking up code

My day can vary, it really depends on which phase of the project I’m on. Let’s say we want to add a feature to our product – my tasks could range from designing solutions and working with the team to find the best one, to deploying new features into production and doing maintenance. Along the way, I’ll communicate changes to our stakeholders, write docs, code and test solutions, build analytics dashboards, clean-up old code, and fix bugs.Read More