VLDB 2026 Research / reviewers in the wild / expert
Nathan M. Urban
dblp:66/10376
· DBLP profile ↗
8ranked-venue papers
0as first author
8since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-2264-3512ORCID · verified
Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several
Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 7 · 7 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 2 · 2 since 2021Databases, data management, data science and information retrieval · 1 · 1 since 2021Applied, interdisciplinary, general and emerging computing · 1 · 1 since 2021
Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.
| Artificial intelligence
2 papers |
Efficient and distributed learning · 33% Trustworthy machine learning · 33% Language models and text generation · 17% | |
| Interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and emerging computing
3 papers |
Computational science and engineering · 54% Environmental and earth informatics · 46% | |
| Databases, data mining, and information retrieval
1 paper |
Data mining · 100% |
Topics — the 12 heaviest of 12, each with the papers that count most for it
| Topic | Weight | Papers | Last | Evidence papers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Environmental and earth informatics
climate modeling |
1.5 | 2 | 2025 | ClimSim-Online: A Large Multi-Scale Dataset and Framework for Hybrid Physics-ML Climate Emulation · J. Mach. Learn. Res. 2025 ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation · NeurIPS 2023 |
Natural language and speech › Language models and text generation
large language model fine-tuning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | C-LoRA: Contextual Low-Rank Adaptation for Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning › parameter-efficient fine-tuning
low-rank adaptation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | C-LoRA: Contextual Low-Rank Adaptation for Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Efficient and distributed learning
parameter-efficient fine-tuning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | C-LoRA: Contextual Low-Rank Adaptation for Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Deep learning architectures and training
scientific machine learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | ClimSim-Online: A Large Multi-Scale Dataset and Framework for Hybrid Physics-ML Climate Emulation · J. Mach. Learn. Res. 2025 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning › uncertainty estimation
uncertainty calibration |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | C-LoRA: Contextual Low-Rank Adaptation for Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models · NeurIPS 2025 |
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
uncertainty estimation |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | C-LoRA: Contextual Low-Rank Adaptation for Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language Models · NeurIPS 2025 |
Computational science and engineering
active learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | A Plug-and-Play Query Synthesis Active Learning Framework for Neural PDE Solvers · NeurIPS 2025 |
Computational science and engineering › partial differential equation solver
neural PDE solver |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | A Plug-and-Play Query Synthesis Active Learning Framework for Neural PDE Solvers · NeurIPS 2025 |
Computational science and engineering
scientific machine learning |
0.9 | 1 | 2025 | A Plug-and-Play Query Synthesis Active Learning Framework for Neural PDE Solvers · NeurIPS 2025 |
Environmental and earth informatics
climate science |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation · NeurIPS 2023 |
Data mining
dataset construction |
0.7 | 1 | 2023 | ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulation · NeurIPS 2023 |
Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics
machine learning emulators · 1.7containerized pipeline · 1.7stochastic regression · 1.3regression baseline · 1.3variational inference · 0.9low-rank adaptation · 0.9expected information gain · 0.9bayesian inference · 0.9backpropagation · 0.9active learning · 0.9
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | C-LoRA: Contextual Low-Rank Adaptation for Uncertainty Estimation in Large Language ModelsabstractLow-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) offers a cost-effective solution for fine-tuning large language models (LLMs), but it often produces overconfident predictions in data-scarce few-shot settings. To address this issue, several classical statistical learning approaches have been repurposed for scalable uncertainty-aware LoRA fine-tuning. However, these approaches neglect how input characteristics affect the predictive uncertainty estimates. To address this limitation, we propose Contextual Low-Rank Adaptation (**C-LoRA**) as a novel uncertainty-aware and parameter efficient fine-tuning approach, by developing new lightweight LoRA modules contextualized to each input data sample to dynamically adapt uncertainty estimates. Incorporating data-driven contexts into the parameter posteriors, C-LoRA mitigates overfitting, achieves well-calibrated uncertainties, and yields robust predictions. Extensive experiments on LLaMA2-7B models demonstrate that C-LoRA consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art uncertainty-aware LoRA methods in both uncertainty quantification and model generalization. Ablation studies further confirm the critical role of our contextual modules in capturing sample-specific uncertainties. C-LoRA sets a new standard for robust, uncertainty-aware LLM fine-tuning in few-shot regimes. Although our experiments are limited to 7B models, our method is architecture-agnostic and, in principle, applies beyond this scale; studying its scaling to larger models remains an open problem. Our code is available at https://github.com/ahra99/c_lora. Amir Hossein Rahmati, Sanket R. Jantre, Byung-Jun Yoon, Nathan M. Urban, Xiaoning Qian |
NeurIPS | 6 |
| 2025 | A Plug-and-Play Query Synthesis Active Learning Framework for Neural PDE SolversabstractIn recent developments in scientific machine learning (SciML), neural surrogate solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs) have become powerful tools for accelerating scientific computation for various science and engineering applications. However, training neural PDE solvers often demands a large amount of high-fidelity PDE simulation data, which are expensive to generate. Active learning (AL) offers a promising solution by adaptively selecting training data from the PDE settings--including parameters, initial and boundary conditions--that are expected to be most informative to help reduce this data burden. In this work, we introduce PaPQS, a Plug-and-Play Query Synthesis AL framework that synthesizes informative PDE settings directly in the continuous design space. PaPQS optimizes the Expected Information Gain (EIG) while encouraging batch diversity, enabling model-aware exploration of the design space via backpropagation through the neural PDE solution trajectories. The framework is applicable to general PDE systems and surrogate architectures, and can be seamlessly integrated with existing AL strategies. Extensive experiments across different PDE systems demonstrate that our AL framework, PaPQS, consistently improves sample efficiency over existing AL baselines. Jinwoo Go, Byung-Jun Yoon, Nathan M. Urban, Xiaoning Qian |
NeurIPS | 4 |
| 2025 | ClimSim-Online: A Large Multi-Scale Dataset and Framework for Hybrid Physics-ML Climate EmulationabstractModern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints, leading to inaccuracies in representing critical processes like thunderstorms that occur on the sub-resolution scale. Hybrid methods combining physics with machine learning (ML) offer faster, higher fidelity climate simulations by outsourcing compute-hungry, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, these hybrid physics-ML simulations require domain-specific data and workflows that have been inaccessible to many ML experts. This paper is an extended version of our NeurIPS award-winning ClimSim dataset paper. The ClimSim dataset includes 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input/output vectors spanning ten years at high temporal resolution, capturing the influence of high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator's macro-scale state. In this extended version, we introduce a significant new contribution in Section 5, which provides a cross-platform, containerized pipeline to integrate ML models into operational climate simulators for hybrid testing. We also implement various baselines of ML models and hybrid simulators to highlight the ML challenges of building stable, skillful emulators. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res, also in a low-resolution version at https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_low-res and an aquaplanet version at https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_low-res_aqua-planet) and code (https://leap-stc.github.io/ClimSim and https://github.com/leap-stc/climsim-online) are publicly released to support the development of hybrid physics-ML and high-fidelity climate simulations. Sungduk Yu, Zeyuan Hu 0005, Akshay Subramaniam, Walter M. Hannah, Liran Peng, Zhiyuan Jerry Lin, Mohamed Aziz Bhouri, Ritwik Gupta, Björn Lütjens, Justus C. Will, Gunnar Behrens, Julius Busecke, Nora Loose, Charles Stern, Tom Beucler, Bryce E. Harrop, Helge Heuer, Benjamin R. Hillman, Andrea M. Jenney, Nana Liu, Alistair White, Zhiming Kuang, Fiaz Ahmed, Elizabeth A. Barnes, Noah D. Brenowitz, Christopher S. Bretherton, Veronika Eyring, Savannah L. Ferretti, Nicholas J. Lutsko, Pierre Gentine, Stephan Mandt, J. David Neelin, Rose Yu, Laure Zanna, Nathan M. Urban, Janni Yuval, Ryan Abernathey, Pierre Baldi, Wayne Chuang, Fernando Iglesias-Suarez, Sanket R. Jantre, Po-Lun Ma, Sara Shamekh, Michael S. Pritchard |
J. Mach. Learn. Res. | 36 |
| 2024 | Learning Active Subspaces for Effective and Scalable Uncertainty Quantification in Deep Neural NetworksabstractBayesian inference for neural networks, or Bayesian deep learning, has the potential to provide well-calibrated predictions with quantified uncertainty and robustness. However, the main hurdle for Bayesian deep learning is its computational complexity due to the high dimensionality of the parameter space. In this work, we propose a novel scheme that addresses this limitation by constructing a low-dimensional subspace of the neural network parameters–referred to as an active subspace–by identifying the parameter directions that have the most significant influence on the output of the neural network. We demonstrate that the significantly reduced active subspace enables effective and scalable Bayesian inference via either Monte Carlo (MC) sampling methods, otherwise computationally intractable, or variational inference. Empirically, our approach provides reliable predictions with robust uncertainty estimates for various regression tasks. Sanket R. Jantre, Nathan M. Urban, Xiaoning Qian, Byung-Jun Yoon |
ICASSP | 2 |
| 2024 | When Uncertainty-Based Active Learning May Fail?
Amir Hossein Rahmati, Mingzhou Fan, Ruida Zhou, Nathan M. Urban, Byung-Jun Yoon, Xiaoning Qian |
ICPR (1) | 4 |
| 2024 | Multi-fidelity Bayesian Optimization with Multiple Information Sources of Input-dependent FidelityabstractBy querying approximate surrogate models of different fidelity as available information sources, Multi-Fidelity Bayesian Optimization (MFBO) aims at optimizing unknown functions that are costly if not infeasible to evaluate. Existing MFBO methods often assume that approximate surrogates have consistently high/low fidelity across the input domain. However, approximate evaluations from the same surrogate can have different fidelity at different input regions due to data availability and model constraints, especially when considering machine learning surrogates. In this work, we investigate MFBO when multi-fidelity approximations have input-dependent fidelity. By explicitly capturing input dependency for multi-fidelity queries in Gaussian Process (GP), our new input-dependent MFBO (iMFBO) with learnable noise models better captures the fidelity of each information source in an intuitive way. We further design a new acquisition function for iMFBO and prove that the queries selected by iMFBO have higher quality than those by naive MFBO methods, with the derived sub-linear regret bound. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data demonstrate its superior empirical performance. Mingzhou Fan, Byung-Jun Yoon, Edward R. Dougherty, Nathan M. Urban, Francis J. Alexander, Raymundo Arróyave, Xiaoning Qian |
UAI | 4 |
| 2023 | ClimSim: A large multi-scale dataset for hybrid physics-ML climate emulationabstractModern climate projections lack adequate spatial and temporal resolution due to computational constraints. A consequence is inaccurate and imprecise predictions of critical processes such as storms. Hybrid methods that combine physics with machine learning (ML) have introduced a new generation of higher fidelity climate simulators that can sidestep Moore's Law by outsourcing compute-hungry, short, high-resolution simulations to ML emulators. However, this hybrid ML-physics simulation approach requires domain-specific treatment and has been inaccessible to ML experts because of lack of training data and relevant, easy-to-use workflows. We present ClimSim, the largest-ever dataset designed for hybrid ML-physics research. It comprises multi-scale climate simulations, developed by a consortium of climate scientists and ML researchers. It consists of 5.7 billion pairs of multivariate input and output vectors that isolate the influence of locally-nested, high-resolution, high-fidelity physics on a host climate simulator's macro-scale physical state.The dataset is global in coverage, spans multiple years at high sampling frequency, and is designed such that resulting emulators are compatible with downstream coupling into operational climate simulators. We implement a range of deterministic and stochastic regression baselines to highlight the ML challenges and their scoring. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/LEAP/ClimSim_high-res) and code (https://leap-stc.github.io/ClimSim) are released openly to support the development of hybrid ML-physics and high-fidelity climate simulations for the benefit of science and society. Sungduk Yu, Walter M. Hannah, Liran Peng, Zhiyuan Jerry Lin, Mohamed Aziz Bhouri, Ritwik Gupta, Björn Lütjens, Justus C. Will, Gunnar Behrens, Julius Busecke, Nora Loose, Charles Stern, Tom Beucler, Bryce E. Harrop, Benjamin R. Hillman, Andrea M. Jenney, Savannah L. Ferretti, Nana Liu, Anima Anandkumar, Noah D. Brenowitz, Veronika Eyring, Nicholas Geneva, Pierre Gentine, Stephan Mandt, Jaideep Pathak, Akshay Subramaniam, Carl Vondrick, Rose Yu, Laure Zanna, Ryan Abernathey, Fiaz Ahmed, David C. Bader, Pierre Baldi, Elizabeth A. Barnes, Christopher S. Bretherton, Peter M. Caldwell, Wayne Chuang, Yilun Han, Fernando Iglesias-Suarez, Sanket R. Jantre, Karthik Kashinath, Marat Khairoutdinov, Thorsten Kurth, Nicholas J. Lutsko, Po-Lun Ma, Griffin Mooers, J. David Neelin, David A. Randall, Sara Shamekh, Nathan M. Urban, Janni Yuval, Mike Pritchard |
NeurIPS | 53 |
| 2021 | Fast Gaussian Process Estimation for Large-Scale In Situ Inference using Convolutional Neural NetworksabstractExascale computing will bring with it significant I/O limitations. One foreseeable consequence of such restrictions is that the user can save only a small fraction of complex simulation data to disk for subsequent analysis. An alternative is to fit statistical models to data in situ, that is, inside the simulation as it runs. This option requires extremely fast statistical estimation to avoid slowing down the simulation. Gaussian processes (GPs) have state-of-the-art predictive performance for modeling spatial data. However, standard estimation methods for GPs scale quite poorly to large data sets as parameter estimation requires inverting a covariance matrix to the size of the data set. In the presented work, we use a convolutional neural network (CNN) to predict the GP parameters for a spatial data set, from a simulation or otherwise, rather than optimize the parameters directly. Our presented case study models spatial data from E3SM, the Department of Energy’s Exascale climate model. The CNN is trained on synthetic data simulated from GP models with known parameters and then applied to data from the climate simulation. In the presented examples, the neural network scheme produces parameter estimates that compare well with standard methods such as maximum likelihood estimation in predictive performance but is obtained four orders of magnitude faster. Divya Banesh, Nishant Panda, Ayan Biswas 0001, Luke Van Roekel, Diane Oyen, Nathan M. Urban, Michael Grosskopf, Jonathan David Wolfe, Earl Lawrence |
IEEE BigData | 6 |