2019-2020 Seminars

May
21
2020

Theoretical Machine Learning Seminar

Forecasting Epidemics and Pandemics
Roni Rosenfeld
3:00pm|Remote Access Only - see link below

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...

May
19
2020

Theoretical Machine Learning Seminar

Neural SDEs: Deep Generative Models in the Diffusion Limit
Maxim Raginsky
12:00pm|Remote Access Only - see link below

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...

May
18
2020

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar I

The Non-Stochastic Control Problem
Elad Hazan
11:00am|https://theias.zoom.us/j/360043913

Linear dynamical systems are a continuous subclass of reinforcement learning models that are widely used in robotics, finance, engineering, and meteorology. Classical control, since the work of Kalman, has focused on dynamics with Gaussian i.i.d...

May
14
2020

Theoretical Machine Learning Seminar

MathZero, The Classification Problem, and Set-Theoretic Type Theory
David McAllester
3:00pm|Remote Access Only - see link below

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...

May
12
2020

Theoretical Machine Learning Seminar

Generative Modeling by Estimating Gradients of the Data Distribution
Stefano Ermon
12:00pm|Remote Access Only - see link below

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...

May
12
2020

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar II

Convex Set Disjointness, Distributed Learning of Halfspaces, and Linear Programming
10:30am|https://theias.zoom.us/j/360043913

Distributed learning protocols are designed to train on distributed data without gathering it all on a single centralized machine, thus contributing to the efficiency of the system and enhancing its privacy. We study a central problem in distributed...

May
11
2020

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar I

Using discrepancy theory to improve the design of randomized controlled trials
Daniel Spielman
11:00am|https://theias.zoom.us/j/360043913

 

In randomized experiments, such as a medical trials, we randomly assign the treatment, such as a drug or a placebo, that each experimental subject receives. Randomization can help us accurately estimate the difference in treatment effects with...

May
07
2020

Theoretical Machine Learning Seminar

Learning probability distributions; What can, What can't be done
Shai Ben-David
3:00pm|Remote Access Only - see link below

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...

May
05
2020

Theoretical Machine Learning Seminar

Boosting Simple Learners
12:00pm|Remote Access Only - see link below

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...

May
05
2020

Computer Science/Discrete Mathematics Seminar II

Recent Progress on Cutting Planes Proofs
Noah Fleming
10:30am|https://theias.zoom.us/j/360043913

 

Proof Complexity studies the length of proofs of propositional tautologies in various restricted proof systems. One of the most well-studied is the Cutting Planes proof system, which captures reasoning which can be expressed using linear...