Theoretical Machine Learning Seminar

Some of the aspects of the world around us are captured in natural language and refer to semantic high-level variables, which often have a causal role (referring to agents, objects, and actions or intentions). These high-level variables also seem to...

In this talk I will introduce our next generation of graph neural networks. GNNs have the property that they are invariant to permutations of the nodes in the graph and to rotations of the graph as a whole. We claim this is unnecessarily restrictive...

We consider sequential prediction with expert advice when the data are generated stochastically, but the distributions generating the data may vary arbitrarily among some constraint set. We quantify relaxations of the classical I.I.D. assumption in...

Competitive optimization is needed for many ML problems such as training GANs, robust reinforcement learning, and adversarial learning. Standard approaches to competitive optimization involve each agent independently optimizing their objective...

Data-driven design is making headway into a number of application areas, including protein, small-molecule, and materials engineering. The design goal is to construct an object with desired properties, such as a protein that binds to a target more...

An important problem today is how to allow multiple distributed entities to train a shared neural network on their private data while protecting data privacy. Federated learning is a standard framework for distributed deep learning Federated...

In the last couple of years, a lot of progress has been made to enhance robustness of models against adversarial attacks. However, two major shortcomings still remain: (i) practical defenses are often vulnerable against strong “adaptive” attack...

Some believe that truly effective and efficient reinforcement learning algorithms must explicitly construct and explicitly reason with models that capture the causal structure of the world. In short, model-based reinforcement learning is not...

In this talk I will discuss two lines of work involving learning in the presence of biased data and strategic behavior. In the first, we ask whether fairness constraints on learning algorithms can actually improve the accuracy of the classifier...

Langevin diffusions are continuous-time stochastic processes that are based on the gradient of a potential function. As such they have many connections---some known and many still to be explored---to gradient-based machine learning. I'll discuss...