papers

Publications (23)

cs.DS2025

Intermediate N-Gramming: Deterministic and Fast N-Grams For Large N and Large Datasets

Ryan R. Curtin, Fred Lu, Edward Raff +1

The number of n-gram features grows exponentially in n, making it computationally demanding to compute the most frequent n-grams even for n as small as 3. Motivated by our producti…

cs.LG2023

Probing the Transition to Dataset-Level Privacy in ML Models Using an Output-Specific and Data-Resolved Privacy Profile

Tyler LeBlond, Joseph Munoz, Fred Lu +4

Differential privacy (DP) is the prevailing technique for protecting user data in machine learning models. However, deficits to this framework include a lack of clarity for selecti…

cs.LG2023

Scaling Up Differentially Private LASSO Regularized Logistic Regression via Faster Frank-Wolfe Iterations

Edward Raff, Amol Khanna, Fred Lu

To the best of our knowledge, there are no methods today for training differentially private regression models on sparse input data. To remedy this, we adapt the Frank-Wolfe algori…

cs.LG2023

Sparse Private LASSO Logistic Regression

Amol Khanna, Fred Lu, Edward Raff +1

LASSO regularized logistic regression is particularly useful for its built-in feature selection, allowing coefficients to be removed from deployment and producing sparse solutions.…

cs.LG2022

Continuously Generalized Ordinal Regression for Linear and Deep Models

Fred Lu, Francis Ferraro, Edward Raff

Ordinal regression is a classification task where classes have an order and prediction error increases the further the predicted class is from the true class. The standard approach…

stat.AP2018

Sub-national levels and trends in contraceptive prevalence, unmet need, and demand for family planning in Nigeria with survey uncertainty

Laina D. Mercer, Fred Lu, Joshua L. Proctor

Ambitious global goals have been established to provide universal access to affordable modern contraceptive methods. The UN's sustainable development goal 3.7.1 proposes satisfying…

cs.LG2025

Differentially Private Iterative Screening Rules for Linear Regression

Amol Khanna, Fred Lu, Edward Raff

Linear -regularized models have remained one of the simplest and most effective tools in data science. Over the past decade, screening rules have risen in popularity as a way…

cs.LG2021

Deep neural networks with controlled variable selection for the identification of putative causal genetic variants

Peyman H. Kassani, Fred Lu, Yann Le Guen +1

Deep neural networks (DNN) have been used successfully in many scientific problems for their high prediction accuracy, but their application to genetic studies remains challenging…

cs.LG2026

Adversarial Samples Are Not Created Equal

Jennifer Crawford, Amol Khanna, Fred Lu +4

Over the past decade, numerous theories have been proposed to explain the widespread vulnerability of deep neural networks to adversarial evasion attacks. Among these, the theory o…

cs.CR2024

Living off the Analyst: Harvesting Features from Yara Rules for Malware Detection

Siddhant Gupta, Fred Lu, Andrew Barlow +5

A strategy used by malicious actors is to "live off the land," where benign systems and tools already available on a victim's systems are used and repurposed for the malicious acto…

stat.AP2016

Advances in using Internet searches to track dengue

Shihao Yang, S. C. Kou, Fred Lu +3

Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that threatens more than half of the world's population. Despite being endemic to over 100 countries, government-led efforts and mechanisms to ti…

stat.ML2021

Evaluating the Disentanglement of Deep Generative Models through Manifold Topology

Sharon Zhou, Eric Zelikman, Fred Lu +3

Learning disentangled representations is regarded as a fundamental task for improving the generalization, robustness, and interpretability of generative models. However, measuring…

cs.LG2024

High-Dimensional Distributed Sparse Classification with Scalable Communication-Efficient Global Updates

Fred Lu, Ryan R. Curtin, Edward Raff +2

As the size of datasets used in statistical learning continues to grow, distributed training of models has attracted increasing attention. These methods partition the data and expl…

cs.LG2024

Optimizing the Optimal Weighted Average: Efficient Distributed Sparse Classification

Fred Lu, Ryan R. Curtin, Edward Raff +2

While distributed training is often viewed as a solution to optimizing linear models on increasingly large datasets, inter-machine communication costs of popular distributed approa…

cs.LG2023

Small Effect Sizes in Malware Detection? Make Harder Train/Test Splits!

Tirth Patel, Fred Lu, Edward Raff +3

Industry practitioners care about small improvements in malware detection accuracy because their models are deployed to hundreds of millions of machines, meaning a 0.1\% change can…

cs.LG2023

The Challenge of Differentially Private Screening Rules

Amol Khanna, Fred Lu, Edward Raff

Linear -regularized models have remained one of the simplest and most effective tools in data analysis, especially in information retrieval problems where n-grams over text wi…

cs.LG2024

Stabilizing Linear Passive-Aggressive Online Learning with Weighted Reservoir Sampling

Skyler Wu, Fred Lu, Edward Raff +1

Online learning methods, like the seminal Passive-Aggressive (PA) classifier, are still highly effective for high-dimensional streaming data, out-of-core processing, and other thro…

cs.CV2023

Exploring the Sharpened Cosine Similarity

Skyler Wu, Fred Lu, Edward Raff +1

Convolutional layers have long served as the primary workhorse for image classification. Recently, an alternative to convolution was proposed using the Sharpened Cosine Similarity…

cs.LG2023

A General Framework for Auditing Differentially Private Machine Learning

Fred Lu, Joseph Munoz, Maya Fuchs +5

We present a framework to statistically audit the privacy guarantee conferred by a differentially private machine learner in practice. While previous works have taken steps toward…

cs.LG2022

Out of Distribution Data Detection Using Dropout Bayesian Neural Networks

Andre T. Nguyen, Fred Lu, Gary Lopez Munoz +3

We explore the utility of information contained within a dropout based Bayesian neural network (BNN) for the task of detecting out of distribution (OOD) data. We first show how pre…

cs.LG2023

A Coreset Learning Reality Check

Fred Lu, Edward Raff, James Holt

Subsampling algorithms are a natural approach to reduce data size before fitting models on massive datasets. In recent years, several works have proposed methods for subsampling ro…

cs.LG2025

Quick-Draw Bandits: Quickly Optimizing in Nonstationary Environments with Extremely Many Arms

Derek Everett, Fred Lu, Edward Raff +2

Canonical algorithms for multi-armed bandits typically assume a stationary reward environment where the size of the action space (number of arms) is small. More recently developed…

cs.LG2023

Neural Bregman Divergences for Distance Learning

Fred Lu, Edward Raff, Francis Ferraro

Many metric learning tasks, such as triplet learning, nearest neighbor retrieval, and visualization, are treated primarily as embedding tasks where the ultimate metric is some vari…