Seminar on Theoretical Machine Learning

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...

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...

Meta-learning (or learning to learn) studies how to use machine learning to design machine learning methods themselves. We consider an optimization-based formulation of meta-learning that learns to design an optimization algorithm automatically...

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...