Previous Special Year Seminar

A continuing mystery in understanding the empirical success of deep neural networks has been in their ability to achieve zero training error and yet generalize well, even when the training data is noisy and there are many more parameters than data...

As deep learning systems become more prevalent in real-world applications it is essential to allow users to exert more control over the system. Exerting some structure over the learned representations enables users to manipulate, interpret, and even...

A common situation in Machine Learning is one where training data is not fully representative of a target population due to bias in the sampling mechanism or high costs in sampling the target population; in such situations, we aim to ’transfer’...

This talk surveys the role of margins in the analysis of deep networks. As a concrete highlight, it sketches a perceptron-based analysis establishing that shallow ReLU networks can achieve small test error even when they are quite narrow, sometimes...

We study sequential probabilistic prediction on data sequences which are not i.i.d., and even potentially generated by an adversary. At each round, the player assigns a probability distribution to possible outcomes and incurs the log-likelihood of...

In this talk, I will discuss my two recent works on Energy-Based Models. In the first work, I discuss how we can reinterpret standard classification architectures as class conditional energy-based models and train them using recently proposed...

Deep neural networks have recently seen an impressive comeback with applications both in the public sector and the sciences. However, despite their outstanding success, a comprehensive theoretical foundation of deep neural networks is still missing...

I’ll discuss the Noisy Quadratic Model, the toy problem of minimizing a convex quadratic function with noisy gradient observations. While the NQM is simple enough to have closed-form dynamics for a variety of optimizers, it gives a surprising amount...