Dear all,,
This is a reminder that on Thursday august 31 we have Chloé Rouyer in the Statistics and Machine Learning Thematic Seminar. There is also a change in topic.
Chloé Rouyer (University of Kopenhagen, https://sites.google.com/view/chloerouyer/home)
Thursday august 31, 16:00-17:00
In person, at the University of Amsterdam
Location: Science park 904 A1.24
Title: A near-optimal best-of-both-worlds algorithm for online learning with feedback graphs
Abstract: In this work, we consider an online learning problem that interpolates between bandits and full information problems: extra observations are granted depending on the action played and the position of that action in a feedback graph, which is known to the learner. While this problem has been widely studied against both adversarial and stochastic environments separately, aiming to obtain best-of-both-worlds guarantees is a challenging problem that has only been studied recently. We propose an algorithm that achieves near-optimal guarantees in both the adversarial and the stochastic regimes simultaneously. Our results are also computationally efficient and can naturally adapt to sequences of feedback graphs that change over time.
Seminar organizers:
Tim van Erven
Botond Szabo
https://mschauer.github.io/StructuresSeminar/
Dear all,
On Thursday august 31 we have Chloé Rouyer in the Statistics and Machine Learning Thematic Seminar.
Chloé Rouyer (University of Kopenhagen, https://sites.google.com/view/chloerouyer/home)
Thursday august 31, 16:00-17:00
In person, at the University of Amsterdam
Location: TBA
Title: No-Regret Online Reinforcement Learning with Adversarial Losses and Transitions
Abstract: We consider a simple reinforcement learning framework known as episodic Markov Decision Processes, which is a repeated game where a learner has to navigate an environment and learn the underlying transitions and reward functions with the goal of maximizing its cumulative reward.
We investigate the effect of corruption on both the transition and the reward functions. Specifically, it has been shown that corrupting the transitions is more detrimental for the learner than corrupting the rewards as a linear amount of corruption on the transitions can lead to linear regret, whereas it is still possible to achieve sublinear regret even with a linear amount of corruption on the rewards (also known as the adversarial regime).
In this work, our goal is to adapt to detangle both notions of corruptions and to propose methods that optimally adapt to each corruption measure.
Seminar organizers:
Tim van Erven
Botond Szabo
https://mschauer.github.io/StructuresSeminar/
We warmly invite you to submit a paper and participate in our Causal
Representation Learning workshop (https://crl-workshop.github.io/) that
will be held *December 15, 2023* at NeurIPS 2023, New Orleans, USA.
Causal Representation Learning is an exciting intersection of machine
learning and causality that aims at learning low-dimensional, high-level
causal variables along with their causal relations directly from raw,
unstructured data, e.g. images.
Our submission deadline has been extended to *October 2, 2023, 23:59 AoE* and
the submission link is
https://openreview.net/group?id=NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/CRL. More
information below.
***MOTIVATION AND TOPICS***
Current machine learning systems have rapidly increased in performance by
leveraging ever-larger models and datasets. Despite astonishing abilities
and impressive demos, these models fundamentally *only learn from
statistical **correlations* and struggle at tasks such as *domain
generalisation, adversarial examples, or planning*, which require
higher-order cognition. This sole reliance on capturing correlations sits
at the core of current debates about making AI systems "truly'' understand.
One promising and so far underexplored approach for obtaining visual
systems that can go *beyond correlations* is integrating ideas from
causality into representation learning.
Causal inference aims to reason about the effect of interventions or
external manipulations on a system, as well as about hypothetical
counterfactual scenarios. Similar to classic approaches to AI, it typically
assumes that the causal variables of interest are given from the outset.
However, real-world data often comprises high-dimensional, low-level
observations (e.g., RGB pixels in a video) and is thus usually not
structured into such meaningful causal units.
To this end, the emerging field of causal representation learning (CRL)
combines the strengths of ML and causality. In CRL we aim at learning
low-dimensional, high-level causal variables along with their causal
relations directly from raw, unstructured data, leading to representations
that support notions such as causal factors, interventions, reasoning, and
planning. In this sense, CRL aligns with the general goal of modern ML to
learn meaningful representations of data that are more robust, explainable,
and performant, and in our workshop we want to catalyze research in this
direction.
This workshop brings together researchers from the emerging CRL community,
as well as from the more classical causality and representation learning
communities, who are interested in learning causal, robust, interpretable
and transferrable representations. Our goal is to foster discussion and
cross-fertilization between causality, representation learning and other
fields, as well as to engage the community in identifying application
domains for this emerging new field. In order to encourage discussions, we
will welcome submissions related to any aspect of CRL, including but not
limited to:
-
Causal representation learning, including self-supervised, multi-modal
or multi-environment CRL, either in time series or in an atemporal
setting, observational or interventional,
-
Causality-inspired representation learning, including learning
representations that are only *approximately* causal, but still useful
in terms of generalization or transfer learning,
-
Abstractions of causal models or in general multi-level causal systems,
-
Connecting CRL with system identification, learning differential
equations from data or sequences of images, or in general connections to
dynamical systems,
-
Theoretical works on identifiability in representation learning broadly,
-
Real-world applications of CRL, e.g. in biology, healthcare, (medical)
imaging or robotics; including new benchmarks or datasets, or addressing
the gap from theory to practice.
***IMPORTANT DATES***
Paper submission deadline: September 29 *October 2, 2023 23:59 AoE *
Notification to authors: October 27, 2023, 23:59 AoE
Camera-ready version and videos: December 1, 2023, 23:59 AoE
Workshop Date: December 15 or 16, 2023 at NeurIPS
***SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS***
As for all NeurIPS workshops, submissions should contain original and
previously unpublished research and they should be formatted using the
NeurIPS latex style. Papers should be submitted as a PDF file and should be
maximum 6 pages in length, including all main results, figures, and tables.
Appendices containing additional details are allowed, but reviewers are not
expected to take this into account.
The workshop will not have proceedings (or in other words, it will not be
archival), which means you can submit the same or extended work as a
publication to other venues after the workshop. This means we also accept
(shortened versions of) submissions to other venues, as long as they are
not published before the workshop date in December.
Submission site: https://openreview.net/group?id=NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/
CRL
***ORGANIZERS***
Sara Magliacane, University of Amsterdam and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab
Atalanti Mastakouri, Amazon
Yuki Asano, University of Amsterdam and Qualcomm Research
Claudia Shi, Columbia University and FAR AI
Cian Eastwood, University of Edinburgh and Max Planck Institute Tübingen
Sébastien Lachapelle, Mila and Samsung’s SAIT AI Lab (SAIL)
Bernhard Schölkopf, Max Planck Institute Tübingen
Caroline Uhler, MIT and Broad Institute