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Edward Moroshko

Publications and source records attributed to Edward Moroshko.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Stress Testing Concept Erasure with Large Language Model Agents

Concept erasure aims to remove semantic concepts from a trained generative model and is increasingly important for responsible AI deployment. However, verifying whether a model has robustly removed targeted concepts remains a critical challenge. Existing evaluation methods are typically pre-defined and static, failing to expose vulnerabilities under diverse natural-language probes and challenging conditions. Moreover, manually designed evaluation strategies can be biased and difficult to scale. We posit that concept erasure evaluation is best formulated as an adaptive hypothesis search, operationalised by agents that iteratively propose, critique, and verify tests to systematically expand coverage of failure modes. To this end, we propose Stress Testing Agents for Concept Erasure (STACE), a framework that autonomously stress-tests concept-erased models using multiple Large Language Model (LLM) agents, by iteratively generating and verifying stress-testing hypotheses grounded by external knowledge. We also introduce a suite of metrics for assessing the performance and efficiency of LLM-agent-powered stress-testing frameworks. Our extensive experiments show that STACE outperforms five LLM-based evaluation baselines on four concept categories. Further analysis across two T2I models, six concept erasure approaches, and various erasure strengths show that STACE is robust for different settings. We also show that STACE can be adapted beyond concept erasure evaluation to other problem domains, such as LLM jailbreaking. Our code is available anonymously.

cs.AI

A Causal Framework for Mitigating Data Shifts in Healthcare

Developing predictive models that perform reliably across diverse patient populations and heterogeneous environments is a core aim of medical research. However, generalization is only possible if the learned model is robust to statistical differences between data used for training and data seen at the time and place of deployment. Domain generalization methods provide strategies to address data shifts, but each method comes with its own set of assumptions and trade-offs. To apply these methods in healthcare, we must understand how domain shifts arise, what assumptions we prefer to make, and what our design constraints are. This article proposes a causal framework for the design of predictive models to improve generalization. Causality provides a powerful language to characterize and understand diverse domain shifts, regardless of data modality. This allows us to pinpoint why models fail to generalize, leading to more principled strategies to prepare for and adapt to shifts. We recommend general mitigation strategies, discussing trade-offs and highlighting existing work. Our causality-based perspective offers a critical foundation for developing robust, interpretable, and clinically relevant AI solutions in healthcare, paving the way for reliable real-world deployment.

cs.LG

Optimal L2 Regularization in High-dimensional Continual Linear Regression

We study generalization in an overparameterized continual linear regression setting, where a model is trained with L2 (isotropic) regularization across a sequence of tasks. We derive a closed-form expression for the expected generalization loss in the high-dimensional regime that holds for arbitrary linear teachers. We demonstrate that isotropic regularization mitigates label noise under both single-teacher and multiple i.i.d. teacher settings, whereas prior work accommodating multiple teachers either did not employ regularization or used memory-demanding methods. Furthermore, we prove that the optimal fixed regularization strength scales nearly linearly with the number of tasks $T$, specifically as $T/\ln T$. To our knowledge, this is the first such result in theoretical continual learning. Finally, we validate our theoretical findings through experiments on linear regression and neural networks, illustrating how this scaling law affects generalization and offering a practical recipe for the design of continual learning systems.

cs.LG

A model predictive control framework with customer-priority tiers for virtual power plant resilience during extreme weather: A UK heatwave case study

Due to changes in frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as heatwaves and storms, power systems around the globe are having to deal with increased imbalance between demand and supply and additional risk of loss of supply, calling for advanced control strategies that strengthen system resilience. This paper develops a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework for coordination of Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) that manages photovoltaic (PV) systems, batteries, and loads before, during, and after extreme weather events. A multi-objective mixed-integer quadratically constrained program is solved to enforce customer-priority tiers, serving critical loads first, while minimizing operating cost and PV curtailment under network and device constraints. Simulations on the IEEE 33-bus distribution network with real UK heatwave data show that, under realistic forecast errors and modeling uncertainties, MPC improves resilience by 11-20% relative to traditional full-horizon optimization. These results indicate the practical viability of receding-horizon coordination for resilient, low-carbon VPP operation during extreme weather.

eess.SY

A Shift in Perspective on Causality in Domain Generalization

The promise that causal modelling can lead to robust AI generalization has been challenged in recent work on domain generalization (DG) benchmarks. We revisit the claims of the causality and DG literature, reconciling apparent contradictions and advocating for a more nuanced theory of the role of causality in generalization. We also provide an interactive demo at https://chai-uk.github.io/ukairs25-causal-predictors/.

cs.LG

CRCE: Coreference-Retention Concept Erasure in Text-to-Image Diffusion Models

Text-to-Image diffusion models can produce undesirable content that necessitates concept erasure. However, existing methods struggle with under-erasure, leaving residual traces of targeted concepts, or over-erasure, mistakenly eliminating unrelated but visually similar concepts. To address these limitations, we introduce CRCE, a novel concept erasure framework that leverages Large Language Models to identify both semantically related concepts that should be erased alongside the target and distinct concepts that should be preserved. By explicitly modelling coreferential and retained concepts semantically, CRCE enables more precise concept removal, without unintended erasure. Experiments demonstrate that CRCE outperforms existing methods on diverse erasure tasks, including real-world object, person identities, and abstract intellectual property characteristics. The constructed dataset CorefConcept and the source code will be release upon acceptance.

cs.CV

Continual Learning in Linear Classification on Separable Data

We analyze continual learning on a sequence of separable linear classification tasks with binary labels. We show theoretically that learning with weak regularization reduces to solving a sequential max-margin problem, corresponding to a special case of the Projection Onto Convex Sets (POCS) framework. We then develop upper bounds on the forgetting and other quantities of interest under various settings with recurring tasks, including cyclic and random orderings of tasks. We discuss several practical implications to popular training practices like regularization scheduling and weighting. We point out several theoretical differences between our continual classification setting and a recently studied continual regression setting.

cs.LG

How catastrophic can catastrophic forgetting be in linear regression?

To better understand catastrophic forgetting, we study fitting an overparameterized linear model to a sequence of tasks with different input distributions. We analyze how much the model forgets the true labels of earlier tasks after training on subsequent tasks, obtaining exact expressions and bounds. We establish connections between continual learning in the linear setting and two other research areas: alternating projections and the Kaczmarz method. In specific settings, we highlight differences between forgetting and convergence to the offline solution as studied in those areas. In particular, when T tasks in d dimensions are presented cyclically for k iterations, we prove an upper bound of T^2 * min{1/sqrt(k), d/k} on the forgetting. This stands in contrast to the convergence to the offline solution, which can be arbitrarily slow according to existing alternating projection results. We further show that the T^2 factor can be lifted when tasks are presented in a random ordering.

cs.LG

On the Implicit Bias of Initialization Shape: Beyond Infinitesimal Mirror Descent

Recent work has highlighted the role of initialization scale in determining the structure of the solutions that gradient methods converge to. In particular, it was shown that large initialization leads to the neural tangent kernel regime solution, whereas small initialization leads to so called "rich regimes". However, the initialization structure is richer than the overall scale alone and involves relative magnitudes of different weights and layers in the network. Here we show that these relative scales, which we refer to as initialization shape, play an important role in determining the learned model. We develop a novel technique for deriving the inductive bias of gradient-flow and use it to obtain closed-form implicit regularizers for multiple cases of interest.

cs.LG

Kernel and Rich Regimes in Overparametrized Models

A recent line of work studies overparametrized neural networks in the "kernel regime," i.e. when the network behaves during training as a kernelized linear predictor, and thus training with gradient descent has the effect of finding the minimum RKHS norm solution. This stands in contrast to other studies which demonstrate how gradient descent on overparametrized multilayer networks can induce rich implicit biases that are not RKHS norms. Building on an observation by Chizat and Bach, we show how the scale of the initialization controls the transition between the "kernel" (aka lazy) and "rich" (aka active) regimes and affects generalization properties in multilayer homogeneous models. We also highlight an interesting role for the width of a model in the case that the predictor is not identically zero at initialization. We provide a complete and detailed analysis for a family of simple depth-$D$ models that already exhibit an interesting and meaningful transition between the kernel and rich regimes, and we also demonstrate this transition empirically for more complex matrix factorization models and multilayer non-linear networks.

cs.LG

Implicit Bias in Deep Linear Classification: Initialization Scale vs Training Accuracy

We provide a detailed asymptotic study of gradient flow trajectories and their implicit optimization bias when minimizing the exponential loss over "diagonal linear networks". This is the simplest model displaying a transition between "kernel" and non-kernel ("rich" or "active") regimes. We show how the transition is controlled by the relationship between the initialization scale and how accurately we minimize the training loss. Our results indicate that some limit behaviors of gradient descent only kick in at ridiculous training accuracies (well beyond $10^{-100}$). Moreover, the implicit bias at reasonable initialization scales and training accuracies is more complex and not captured by these limits.

cs.LG

Kernel and Rich Regimes in Overparametrized Models

A recent line of work studies overparametrized neural networks in the "kernel regime," i.e. when the network behaves during training as a kernelized linear predictor, and thus training with gradient descent has the effect of finding the minimum RKHS norm solution. This stands in contrast to other studies which demonstrate how gradient descent on overparametrized multilayer networks can induce rich implicit biases that are not RKHS norms. Building on an observation by Chizat and Bach, we show how the scale of the initialization controls the transition between the "kernel" (aka lazy) and "rich" (aka active) regimes and affects generalization properties in multilayer homogeneous models. We provide a complete and detailed analysis for a simple two-layer model that already exhibits an interesting and meaningful transition between the kernel and rich regimes, and we demonstrate the transition for more complex matrix factorization models and multilayer non-linear networks.

cs.LG

Finite Sample Analysis Of Dynamic Regression Parameter Learning

We consider the dynamic linear regression problem, where the predictor vector may vary with time. This problem can be modeled as a linear dynamical system, with non-constant observation operator, where the parameters that need to be learned are the variance of both the process noise and the observation noise. While variance estimation for dynamic regression is a natural problem, with a variety of applications, existing approaches to this problem either lack guarantees altogether, or only have asymptotic guarantees without explicit rates. In particular, existing literature does not provide any clues to the following fundamental question: In terms of data characteristics, what does the convergence rate depend on? In this paper we study the global system operator -- the operator that maps the noise vectors to the output. We obtain estimates on its spectrum, and as a result derive the first known variance estimators with finite sample complexity guarantees. The proposed bounds depend on the shape of a certain spectrum related to the system operator, and thus provide the first known explicit geometric parameter of the data that can be used to bound estimation errors. In addition, the results hold for arbitrary sub Gaussian distributions of noise terms. We evaluate the approach on synthetic and real-world benchmarks.

cs.LG

An Editorial Network for Enhanced Document Summarization

We suggest a new idea of Editorial Network - a mixed extractive-abstractive summarization approach, which is applied as a post-processing step over a given sequence of extracted sentences. Our network tries to imitate the decision process of a human editor during summarization. Within such a process, each extracted sentence may be either kept untouched, rephrased or completely rejected. We further suggest an effective way for training the "editor" based on a novel soft-labeling approach. Using the CNN/DailyMail dataset we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art extractive-only or abstractive-only baseline methods.

cs.CL

Multi Instance Learning For Unbalanced Data

In the context of Multi Instance Learning, we analyze the Single Instance (SI) learning objective. We show that when the data is unbalanced and the family of classifiers is sufficiently rich, the SI method is a useful learning algorithm. In particular, we show that larger data imbalance, a quality that is typically perceived as negative, in fact implies a better resilience of the algorithm to the statistical dependencies of the objects in bags. In addition, our results shed new light on some known issues with the SI method in the setting of linear classifiers, and we show that these issues are significantly less likely to occur in the setting of neural networks. We demonstrate our results on a synthetic dataset, and on the COCO dataset for the problem of patch classification with weak image level labels derived from captions.

cs.LG

Efficient Loss-Based Decoding on Graphs For Extreme Classification

In extreme classification problems, learning algorithms are required to map instances to labels from an extremely large label set. We build on a recent extreme classification framework with logarithmic time and space, and on a general approach for error correcting output coding (ECOC) with loss-based decoding, and introduce a flexible and efficient approach accompanied by theoretical bounds. Our framework employs output codes induced by graphs, for which we show how to perform efficient loss-based decoding to potentially improve accuracy. In addition, our framework offers a tradeoff between accuracy, model size and prediction time. We show how to find the sweet spot of this tradeoff using only the training data. Our experimental study demonstrates the validity of our assumptions and claims, and shows that our method is competitive with state-of-the-art algorithms.

cs.LG

Selective Sampling with Drift

Recently there has been much work on selective sampling, an online active learning setting, in which algorithms work in rounds. On each round an algorithm receives an input and makes a prediction. Then, it can decide whether to query a label, and if so to update its model, otherwise the input is discarded. Most of this work is focused on the stationary case, where it is assumed that there is a fixed target model, and the performance of the algorithm is compared to a fixed model. However, in many real-world applications, such as spam prediction, the best target function may drift over time, or have shifts from time to time. We develop a novel selective sampling algorithm for the drifting setting, analyze it under no assumptions on the mechanism generating the sequence of instances, and derive new mistake bounds that depend on the amount of drift in the problem. Simulations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our algorithms as a selective sampling algorithm in the drifting setting.

cs.LG

A Last-Step Regression Algorithm for Non-Stationary Online Learning

The goal of a learner in standard online learning is to maintain an average loss close to the loss of the best-performing single function in some class. In many real-world problems, such as rating or ranking items, there is no single best target function during the runtime of the algorithm, instead the best (local) target function is drifting over time. We develop a novel last-step minmax optimal algorithm in context of a drift. We analyze the algorithm in the worst-case regret framework and show that it maintains an average loss close to that of the best slowly changing sequence of linear functions, as long as the total of drift is sublinear. In some situations, our bound improves over existing bounds, and additionally the algorithm suffers logarithmic regret when there is no drift. We also build on the H_infinity filter and its bound, and develop and analyze a second algorithm for drifting setting. Synthetic simulations demonstrate the advantages of our algorithms in a worst-case constant drift setting.

cs.LG