Special Year 2019-20: Optimization, Statistics, and Theoretical Machine Learning - Seminar

Large-scale vision benchmarks have driven---and often even defined---progress in machine learning. However, these benchmarks are merely proxies for the real-world tasks we actually care about. How well do our benchmarks capture such tasks?

In this...

Epidemiological forecasting is critically needed for decision making by national and local governments, public health officials, healthcare institutions and the general public. The Delphi group at Carnegie Mellon University was founded in 2012 to...

In deep generative models, the latent variable is generated by a time-inhomogeneous Markov chain, where at each time step we pass the current state through a parametric nonlinear map, such as a feedforward neural net, and add a small independent...

AlphaZero learns to play go, chess and shogi at a superhuman level through self play given only the rules of the game. This raises the question of whether a similar thing could be done for mathematics --- a MathZero. MathZero would require a formal...

Existing generative models are typically based on explicit representations of probability distributions (e.g., autoregressive or VAEs) or implicit sampling procedures (e.g., GANs). We propose an alternative approach based on modeling directly the...

A possible high level description of statistical learning is that it aims to learn about some unknown probability distribution ("environment”) from samples it generates ("training data”). In its most general form, assuming no prior knowledge and...

We study boosting algorithms under the assumption that the given weak learner outputs hypotheses from a class of bounded capacity. This assumption is inspired by the common convention that weak hypotheses are “rules-of-thumbs” from an “easy-to-learn...

Much real-world data is sampled at irregular intervals, but most time series models require regularly-sampled data. Continuous-time models address this problem, but until now only deterministic (ODE) models or linear-Gaussian models were efficiently...

Modern deep generative models like GANs, VAEs and invertible flows are showing amazing results on modeling high-dimensional distributions, especially for images. We will show how they can be used to solve inverse problems by generalizing compressed...

There has been tremendous progress in designing accurate black-box prediction methods (boosting, random forests, bagging, neural nets, etc.) but for deployment in the real world, it is useful to quantify uncertainty beyond making point-predictions...