School of Mathematics

Given a smooth knot K in the 3-sphere, a classic question in knot theory is: What surfaces in the 4-ball have boundary equal to K? One can also consider immersed surfaces and ask a “geography” question: What combinations of genus and double points...

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...

This talk aims to summarize a project I was involved in during the past 5 years, with the hope of explaining our most complete understanding so far, as well as challenges and open problems. The main messages of this project are summarized below; I...

Organizers: Sanjeev Arora, Sanjoy Dasgupta, Roger Grosse, Sham Kakade and Bin Yu.

In this talk, I would like to share some of my reflections on the progress made in the field of interpretable machine learning. We will reflect on where we are going as a field, and what are the things that we need to be aware of to make progress...

There are several broad insights we can draw from computational models of human cognition in order to build more human-like forms of machine learning. (1) The brain has a great deal of built-in structure, yet still tremendous need and potential for...

Standard machine learning produces models that are highly accurate on average but that degrade dramatically when the test distribution deviates from the training distribution. While one can train robust models, this often comes at the expense of...

Physical processes in the world often have a modular structure, with complexity emerging through combinations of simpler subsystems. Machine learning seeks to uncover and use regularities in the physical world. Although these regularities manifest...

Despite the success of deep learning, much of its success has existed in settings where the goal is to learn one, single-purpose function from data. However, in many contexts, we hope to optimize neural networks for multiple, distinct tasks (i.e...