Alex Tamkin
PhD Student, Computer Science, Stanford University
Email: atamkin_stanford_edu | Twitter: alextamkin
I'm a fifth-year PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford, advised by Noah Goodman and part of the Stanford NLP Group and the Stanford AI Lab.
My research focuses on large pretrained models (e.g. GPT-3) and how we can better build, understand, and control them. I'm especially interested in multimodal and domain-agnostic pretraining, which has the potential to unlock important applications in healthcare, engineering, and the natural sciences.
In the past, I've also worked in reinforcement learning, human-robot interaction, and computational astronomy, and I've spent time at Google Brain, Google Language, and Google Civics.
I'm grateful to be supported by an Open Philanthropy AI Fellowship.
In Fall 2021 I was the instructor of Stanford's CS 197: Computer Science Research. (Slides and materials)
Talks
- UC Berkeley, October 2022
- MIT, October 2022
- Cornell University, September 2022
- Columbia University, September 2022
- University of Washington, June 2022, Self-Supervised Learning for the Real World
- Harvard Medical School, February 2022, DABS: A Domain-Agnostic Benchmark for Self-Supervised Learning
- Invited Talk, NeurIPS Workshop on Controllable Generative Modeling in Language and Vision, December 2021, Off the Beaten Path: Domain-Agnostic ML for Controllable Generation and Beyond
- Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models, October 2021, Active Learning Helps Pretrained Models Find the Intended Task
- Stanford Vision and Learning Lab, August 2021, Towards Universal Self-Supervision
- Stanford OVAL Seminar, May 2021, Understanding and Controlling Transfer Learning in Large Language Models
- FAIR, December 2020, Language Through a Prism: A Spectral Approach for Multiscale Language Representations.
- Google Brain, September 2018, Searching for Planets with WaveNet
- NASA Ames Research Center, September 2018, Overcoming Dataset Challenges for Vetting Exoplanets with Machine Learning.
Publications
DABS 2.0: Improved Datasets and Algorithms for Universal Self-Supervision
Alex Tamkin, Gaurab Banerjee, Mohamed Owda, Vincent Liu, Shashank Rammoorthy, Noah GoodmanNeurIPS 2022 (Datasets and Benchmarks Track)Active Learning Helps Pretrained Models Learn the Intended Task [🐦thread]
Alex Tamkin*, Dat Nguyen*, Salil Deshpande*, Jesse Mu, Noah GoodmanNeurIPS 2022Oolong: Investigating What Makes Crosslingual Transfer Hard with Controlled Studies [🐦thread]
Zhengxuan Wu*, Isabel Papadimitriou*, Alex Tamkin*ArXiv PreprintDABS: A Domain-Agnostic Benchmark for Self-Supervised Learning [🌐site] [🐦thread]
Alex Tamkin, Vincent Liu, Rongfei Lu, Daniel Fein, Colin Schultz, Noah GoodmanNeurIPS 2021 (Datasets and Benchmarks Track)Press: [Redshift Magazine] [AIM Magazine] [Stanford HAI]Tradeoffs Between Contrastive and Supervised Learning: An Empirical Study
Ananya Karthik, Mike Wu, Noah Goodman, Alex TamkinNeurIPS 2021 Workshop on Self-Supervised Learning - Theory and PracticeC5T5: Controllable Generation of Organic Molecules with Transformers
Daniel Rothchild, Alex Tamkin, Julie Yu, Ujval Misra, Joseph GonzalezArXiv PreprintOn the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
Center for Research on Foundation Models (full list of authors)– Section 4.2: Training and Self-Supervision, Alex Tamkin– Section 4.9: AI Safety and Alignment, Alex Tamkin, Geoff Keeling, Jack Ryan, Sydney von Arx– Coauthor: Sections §2.2: Vision, §3.3: Education, §4.1 Modeling, §5.6: Ethics of ScalePress: [Forbes] [The Economist] [VentureBeat]Viewmaker Networks: Learning Views for Unsupervised Representation Learning [📝blogpost] [🐦thread]
Alex Tamkin, Mike Wu, Noah GoodmanICLR 2021Language Through a Prism: A Spectral Approach for Multiscale Language Representations [🐦thread] [📝blogpost]
Alex Tamkin, Dan Jurafsky, Noah GoodmanNeurIPS 2020Investigating Transferability in Pretrained Language Models [🐦thread]
Alex Tamkin, Trisha Singh, Davide Giovanardi, Noah GoodmanFindings of EMNLP 2020; Presented at CoNLL 2020Distributionally-Aware Exploration for CVaR Bandits.
Alex Tamkin, Ramtin Keramati, Christoph Dann, Emma Brunskill. NeurIPS 2019 Workshop on Safety and Robustness in Decision Making; RLDM 2019Being Optimistic to Be Conservative: Quickly Learning a CVaR Policy
Ramtin Keramati, Christoph Dann, Alex Tamkin, Emma Brunskill. AAAI 2020Recursive Routing Networks: Learning to Compose Modules for Language Understanding.
Ignacio Cases, Clemens Rosenbaum, Matthew Riemer, Atticus Geiger, Tim Klinger, Alex Tamkin, Olivia Li, Sandhini Agarwal, Joshua D Greene, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher Potts, Lauri KarttunenNAACL 2019Drone.io: A Gestural and Visual Interface for Human-Drone Interaction.
Jessica R Cauchard, Alex Tamkin, Cheng Yao Wang, Luke Vink, Michelle Park, Tommy Fang, James A Landay. HRI 2019 Andrew Vanderburg, Christopher Shallue, Liang Yu, Anne Dattilo, Alex Tamkin. American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts, 2019Other Writing
Understanding the Capabilities, Limitations, and Societal Impact of Large Language Models [📝blogpost]
Alex Tamkin*, Miles Brundage*, Jack Clark, Deep GanguliArXiv Preprint Press: [VentureBeat] [Datanami] [Slator]Input on the European Commission White Paper on Artificial Intelligence
Marietje Schaake, Elisabeth Appel, Dathan M. Duplichen, Lisa Einstein, Wren Elhai, Muhammad Dhafer, Muhammad Faishal, Agata Foryciarz, Sydney L. Frankenberg, Toni Friedman, Zoe Huczok, Kyra Jasper, Danielle Jablanski, Jennifer King, Cindy Kuang, Heajune Lee, Shreya Mantha, Vidyangi Patil, Gailyn Portelance, Adriana Stephan, Alex Tamkin, Alessandro Vecchiato, Eva Zhang, Jason Zhao(See Essays for more)
Media
AI Artwork in PC Magazine (twitter thread: DALL-E Meets WALL-E: an Art History)
Interview on The Gradient Podcast - Alex Tamkin on Self-Supervised Learning and Large Language Models
Press: [Communications of the ACM]Interview on The Engineered Mind Podcast - NLP, AI Ethics & PhD Life
Personal
Other topics I think a lot about:
Societal impacts of technology, especially machine learning and large language models
Mentoring, teaching and fostering a healthy and inclusive research culture
Scientific communication and breaking down walls between fields
Outside of research, I organize the Stanford Queer in AI Dinner with Stanford Inclusion in AI
I also like making art, especially ceramics and photography!