I have 6 fantastic students and post-docs who are on the academic job market this year. Here is a short thread summarizing their work along with one representative paper:
Niladri Chatterji (@niladrichat) develops holistic theoretical understanding in the brave new world of deep learning, capturing optimization and generalization in non-convex and overparametrized settings. Benign overfitting without linearity: arxiv.org/pdf/2202.05928…
Ananya Kumar (@ananyaku) focuses on foundation models for robustness to distribution shift. He develops theory on the role of data in pretraining and how to best fine-tune; these insights lead to SOTA results. Fine-tuning can distort features: arxiv.org/pdf/2202.10054…
Mina Lee (@MinaLee__) studies how humans interact with language models for writing and other tasks. She brings a fresh human-centered perspective to the default automation framing of LMs. Evaluating human-LM interaction: arxiv.org/pdf/2212.09746…