

Frederic Sala is Chief Scientist at Snorkel AI and an assistant professor in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research studies the fundamentals of data-driven systems and machine learning, with a focus on foundation models, automated machine learning, learning with limited data. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from UCLA.
The latest from Fred


Snorkel and affiliated academic labs have been hard at work reducing how computationally expensive large language models are.


This paper proposes generalizations of CWOLA and SALAD, which exploit multiple reference datasets to improve performance in resonant anomaly detection, and provides finite-sample guarantees to go beyond existing asymptotic analyses.


This paper proposes “Ask Me Anything” (AMA), a prompting method that uses weak supervision to combine noisy predictions from multiple prompts generated from an LLM, resulting in an average 10.2% performance lift over the few-shot baseline across a variety of different open-source models.


AutoWS-Bench-101 is a framework for evaluating automated weak supervision techniques compared to other baseline methods such as zero-shot foundation models and supervised learning, in order to help practitioners choose the best method to generate additional labels.


This paper finds that weak supervision can be used beyond classification applications, including rankings, graphs, and manifolds, and can provide generalization guarantees nearly identical to models trained on clean data.


This work proposes and theoretically justifies a model that fuses weak supervision and generative adversarial networks to improve the estimate of unobserved labels and data augmentation, outperforming baseline weak supervision models on multiclass image classification datasets.


Liger, a combination of foundation models and weak supervision frameworks, improves existing weak supervision techniques by partitioning the embedding space and extending source votes in embedding space, resulting in improved performance on six benchmark NLP and video tasks.


Constructing labeling functions (LFs) is at the heart of using weak supervision. We often think of these labeling functions as programmatic expressions of domain expertise or heuristics. Indeed, much of the advantage of weak supervision is that we can save time—writing labeling functions and applying them to data at scale is much more efficient compared to hand-labeling huge numbers of…
This paper proposes a universal technique that enables weak supervision over any label type while still offering desirable properties, including practical flexibility, computational efficiency, and theoretical guarantees.

