Authors

Zeynep Akata

Publications 7

Preprint Open access

Task Vector Descent: Learning from Non-IID Batches

A central challenge in continual learning is to acquire new knowledge without forgetting what the model has already learned. This challenge appears in language model training when training data comes from various domain-, user-, or task-specific distributions that are encountered unevenly over time. In such settings, s …

Preprint Open access

NegT2IBench: When Negation Changes the Picture. A Polarity Benchmark for Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) models are judged by benchmarks that measure whether requested content appears, but these benchmarks largely overlook the complementary ability to satisfy negated constraints, for example, generating "a non-red cup." Measuring negation raises challenges not faced by affirmation-based benchmarks and …

Preprint Open access

Replay on Demand: An Emergent Curriculum for Balancing Adaptation and Forgetting in Continued Pretraining

Continued pretraining enables language models to adapt to new domains and knowledge, but often at the cost of forgetting previously acquired capabilities. Replay can mitigate this trade-off, but fixed replay mixtures allocate training independently of the model's actual retention needs. We introduce Replay on Demand (R …

Preprint Open access

User Model Extraction via Belief Self-Distillation

Large language models (LLMs) implicitly infer attributes of their users and adapt their behavior accordingly, yet these beliefs remain difficult to inspect and causally manipulate. We introduce Belief Self-Distillation (BSD), a unified read-write framework that bridges linear and causal probing by learning a compact us …

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