Publications (8)
Privately Customizing Prefinetuning to Better Match User Data in Federated Learning
Charlie Hou, Hongyuan Zhan, Akshat Shrivastava +4
In Federated Learning (FL), accessing private client data incurs communication and privacy costs. As a result, FL deployments commonly prefinetune pretrained foundation models on a…
POPri: Private Federated Learning using Preference-Optimized Synthetic Data
Charlie Hou, Mei-Yu Wang, Yige Zhu +2
In practical settings, differentially private Federated learning (DP-FL) is the dominant method for training models from private, on-device client data. Recent work has suggested t…
SquirRL: Automating Attack Analysis on Blockchain Incentive Mechanisms with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Charlie Hou, Mingxun Zhou, Yan Ji +4
Incentive mechanisms are central to the functionality of permissionless blockchains: they incentivize participants to run and secure the underlying consensus protocol. Designing in…
Pretrained deep models outperform GBDTs in Learning-To-Rank under label scarcity
Charlie Hou, Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil, Michael Shavlovsky +3
On tabular data, a significant body of literature has shown that current deep learning (DL) models perform at best similarly to Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDTs), while signi…
FedChain: Chained Algorithms for Near-Optimal Communication Cost in Federated Learning
Charlie Hou, Kiran K. Thekumparampil, Giulia Fanti +1
Federated learning (FL) aims to minimize the communication complexity of training a model over heterogeneous data distributed across many clients. A common approach is local method…
PrE-Text: Training Language Models on Private Federated Data in the Age of LLMs
Charlie Hou, Akshat Shrivastava, Hongyuan Zhan +5
On-device training is currently the most common approach for training machine learning (ML) models on private, distributed user data. Despite this, on-device training has several d…