Dear colleagues,

Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) kindly invites you to a lecture afternoon focused on theory of machine learning, with two distinguished speakers that will focus on philosophical and technical challenges in learning to model and explore the unknown environment.

The program on 12 April:
14.00  Jonas Peters (University of Copenhagen): Recent Advances in Causal Inference
15.00  Break
15.30  Tor Lattimore (DeepMind): The Curse and Blessing of Curvature for Zeroth-order Convex Optimisation
16.30  Reception

The first talk will be delivered remotely, the second live. For further details, please check the abstracts below and the website.

These research-level lectures are intended for a non-specialist audience, and are freely accessible.

The event takes place in the Amsterdam Science Park Congress Centre.

This "Mid Semester Lecture", marks the half-way point of the Machine Learning Theory Semester Programme, which runs in Spring 2023. Researchers in Machine Learning Theory may also be interested in the ongoing Seminar++ meetings every other Wednesday.


Best regards on behalf of CWI from the program committee,

Wouter Koolen

The Curse and Blessing of Curvature for Zeroth-order Convex Optimisation

Abstract: Zeroth-order convex optimisation is still quite poorly understood. I will tell a story about how to use gradient-based methods without access to gradients and explain how curvature of the loss function plays the roles of both devil and angel. The main result is a near-optimal sample-complexity analysis of a simple and computationally efficient second-order method applied to a quadratic surrogate loss.

The talk is based on a recent paper with András György.

Jonas Peters
Recent Advances in Causal Inference

Abstract: see website