Yoav Wald

Faculty fellow @NYUDataScience, incoming assistant prof. @TechnionLive. Causal ML and healthcare applications.

[Rico Angell @rico_angell]

It’s deployment time!

You’ve done the pre-deployment evals. You THINK your model is safe, so you ship it 🚀

🚨 After deployment, reports of misbehavior start trickling in

What happened?? How could you have caught it?? 🤔

@icmlconf 2026 Spotlight!

🧵

[Yoav Wald @wald_yoav]

@marikgoldstein Congrats!!

[Yoav Wald @wald_yoav]

@seohong_park Yeah! We wondered the same in casual inference / offline RL.
We found earliest disagreement times, a type of adaptive time scale, are a useful concept for continuous or finely discretized times.
Could benefit from some large scale experiments, lots to do!

https://t.co/uWC2wwG8Sx

[Yoav Wald @wald_yoav]

@nsaphra @najoungkim @amuuueller That’s super! Congrats to U&BU!

[Naomi Saphra @nsaphra]

Life update: I'm starting as faculty at Boston University in 2026! BU has SCHEMES for LM interpretability & analysis, so I couldn't be more pumped to join a burgeoning supergroup w/ @najoungkim @amuuueller. Looking for my first students, so apply and reach out!

[Yoav Wald @wald_yoav]

What prompt generated the image on the right?
Come find out today at our tutorial on OOD generalization: Shortcuts, Spuriousness, and Stability

@Maggiemakar @aahladpuli
Panel: @ElanRosenfeld @AdtRaghunathan Danica Sutherland

[Michael Oberst @MichaelOberst]

I'm recruiting PhD students for Fall 2025! CS PhD Deadline: Dec. 15th.
I work on safe/reliable ML and causal inference, motivated by healthcare applications.
Beyond myself, Johns Hopkins has a rich community of folks doing similar work! Come join us!

[Zachary Lipton @zacharylipton]

Unpacking what's going on in our paper on Med-* foundation models & their failure to improve over their generic counterparts (think Med-{LLaMa, LLaVa} vs {LLaMa, LLaVa}. A familiar tale of motivated reasoning, sloppy eval, & hidden hyper-optimization.

https://t.co/HDnJVxiHcO

[Noga Zaslavsky @NogaZaslavsky]

I'm recruiting PhD students this cycle! My lab works at the intersection of information theory, cognition, language, and AI. Wanna hear more? I asked notebookLM to generate a podcast just for you (but pls take it with a big grain of salt...)
https://t.co/YGPrJEh8gm

[Adriel Saporta @ARSaporta]

Multimodal representation learning works for 2 modalities, but what if you're working with 3+ modalities, like in healthcare, robotics, or video?

📢 Meet Symile: a model-agnostic contrastive loss for any number of modalities with CLIP's simplicity and superior performance✨

1/n

[Suchi Saria @suchisaria]

Will your LLM model generalize over time or across sites? How do we improve robustness? This is a key issue LLMs struggle with and especially critical as we apply these models to healthcare applications.

👇 New clever technique to improve LLM robustness and generalization. Published @NeurIPSConf w/ wonderful postdoctoral fellow @wald_yoav & superb co-authors from Columbia.

https://t.co/1Am9t3yBaQ

https://t.co/iDg68Lnn10

[Yoav Wald @wald_yoav]

@ninoscherrer @AmirFeder @causalclaudia @suchisaria @amir_feder Oh no! Failing to acknowledge Amir + exposing my horrible tweeting skills... Thanks for the handle :)

[Yoav Wald @wald_yoav]

Drop by our #NeurIPS2023 poster (#910) today (Wed.) at 5PM!
We improve OOD generalization in text applications with Language Models + Causal-inference-inspired data augmentation.

w/ best possible co-lead @AmirFeder , and @causalclaudia, @suchisaria, David Blei

[Yoav Wald @wald_yoav]

Also, better late than never, yesterday @aahladpuli presented his cool work about shortcut learning in perception tasks. Some nice insights about useful inductive biases in these tasks.
https://t.co/Ajaq1JT0Bg

[Kyunghyun Cho @kchonyc]

a very interesting observation: all you need is perceptron 🤣

https://t.co/4zU6EVKIJa

by @aahladpuli @lilyhzhang Yoav Wald & Rajesh Ranganath

[Lior Zalmanson @Zalmanson]

Thank you @ERC_Research for this amazing grant- I will
work hard (with and without the algorithms’ help) on these topics for the next few years and would love to update you with exciting results soon.

[Elliot Creager @elliot_creager]

Once more, in verbose mode: as of today I am an Assistant Professor @WaterlooENG (ECE dept), and faculty affiliate @VectorInst and @TorontoSRI.

Please help me get the word out - I will be hiring motivated students who want to study machine learning and its societal implications

[Yoav Wald @wald_yoav]

This comes up in monitoring safety, where novel types of data necessitates a reevaluation of existing models.

Under a "mild" assumption, we give a method + bounds on detecting the novel subgroup.

[Yoav Wald @wald_yoav]

Our #UAI2023 paper is on detecting novel subgroups (aka classes/categories) when distribution of non-novel data shifts.
If this sounds interesting, or you’re wondering what it has to do with unicorns, check out our poster/paper/drop a line.

w/ @suchisaria
https://t.co/7nrMfDblfx

[Adam Gleave @ARGleave]

Excited to be moderating panel on generalization, scaling and safety at #icml2023 with great panelists @sleepinyourhat @zacharylipton and @Maggiemakar. Look forward to seeing folks at 15:30 room 316 at Workshop on Spurious Correlations, Invariance and Stability.