Max Torop

I am a fifth year PhD candidate in Prof. Jennifer Dy’s Machine Learning Lab at Northeastern University. I’m broadly interested in interpretable ML, self-supervised learning and inference time steering of LLMs. I also collaborate with scientists at MSKCC, applying ML to dermatology. I was a research intern at Apple during the summer of 2024, where I worked on methods for selecting SFT/RLHF training data for LLMs.

Before coming to Northeastern I completed a Masters in CS at WUSTL, where I developed deep learning methods for MRI processing as a member of Prof. Ulugbek Kamilov’s Computational Imaging Group. I recieved a BS in Data Science from the University of Rochester in 2018.

Outside of research I love to watch anime and read. Some favorites are One Piece, Fullmetal Alchemist, Dororo, One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Stormlight Archive, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, East of Eden and Hyperion.

News

Oct 24, 2024	Gave a talk on our work SmoothHess to Prof. Doshi-Velez’s DtAK lab at Harvard.
Apr 22, 2024	I’ll be joining Apple as an ML Research Intern this Summer!
Jan 19, 2024	Our work Boundary-Aware Uncertainty for Feature Attribution Explainers was accepted to AISTATS 2024!
Sep 22, 2023	Our work SmoothHess: ReLU Network Feature Interactions via Stein’s Lemma was accepted to NeurIPS 2023!
May 13, 2022	Our work using contrastive learning for spirometry accepted to ATS 2022 as an oral presentation.

Selected Publications

2024

Boundary-Aware Uncertainty for Feature Attribution Explainers

Davin Hill, Aria Masoomi, Max Torop, and 2 more authors

In Proceedings of The 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, 02–04 may 2024

arXiv Bib Code Poster

@inproceedings{pmlr-v238-hill24a,
  title = { Boundary-Aware Uncertainty for Feature Attribution Explainers },
  author = {Hill, Davin and Masoomi, Aria and Torop, Max and Ghimire, Sandesh and Dy, Jennifer},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of The 27th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  pages = {55--63},
  year = {2024},
  editor = {Dasgupta, Sanjoy and Mandt, Stephan and Li, Yingzhen},
  volume = {238},
  series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = {02--04 May},
  publisher = {PMLR},
}

2023

SmoothHess: ReLU Network Feature Interactions via Stein’s Lemma

Max Torop, Aria Masoomi, Davin Hill, and 3 more authors

In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 02–04 may 2023

arXiv Bib Code Poster

@inproceedings{NEURIPS2023_9ef5e965,
  author = {Torop, Max and Masoomi, Aria and Hill, Davin and Kose, Kivanc and Ioannidis, Stratis and Dy, Jennifer},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  editor = {Oh, A. and Naumann, T. and Globerson, A. and Saenko, K. and Hardt, M. and Levine, S.},
  pages = {50697--50729},
  publisher = {Curran Associates, Inc.},
  title = {SmoothHess: ReLU Network Feature Interactions via Stein\textquotesingle s Lemma},
  volume = {36},
  year = {2023},
}

2021

Unsupervised Approaches for Out-Of-Distribution Dermoscopic Lesion Detection

Max Torop, Sandesh Ghimire, Wenqian Liu, and 5 more authors

NeurIPS Medical Imaging Meets NeurIPS Workshop, 02–04 may 2021

arXiv Bib

@article{torop2021unsupervised,
  title = {Unsupervised Approaches for Out-Of-Distribution Dermoscopic Lesion Detection},
  author = {Torop, Max and Ghimire, Sandesh and Liu, Wenqian and Brooks, Dana H and Camps, Octavia and Rajadhyaksha, Milind and Dy, Jennifer and Kose, Kivanc},
  journal = {NeurIPS Medical Imaging Meets NeurIPS Workshop},
  year = {2021},
}

2020

Deep learning using a biophysical model for robust and accelerated reconstruction of quantitative, artifact-free and denoised images

Max Torop, Satya VVN Kothapalli, Yu Sun, and 4 more authors

Magnetic resonance in medicine, 02–04 may 2020

arXiv Bib

@article{torop2020deep,
  title = {Deep learning using a biophysical model for robust and accelerated reconstruction of quantitative, artifact-free and denoised images},
  author = {Torop, Max and Kothapalli, Satya VVN and Sun, Yu and Liu, Jiaming and Kahali, Sayan and Yablonskiy, Dmitriy A and Kamilov, Ulugbek S},
  journal = {Magnetic resonance in medicine},
  volume = {84},
  number = {6},
  pages = {2932--2942},
  year = {2020},
  publisher = {Wiley Online Library},
}