Real-world application of data analysis is a far cry from what we are taught in classrooms or online courses. Whereas the data we are shown in educational settings is typically homogenous and presented in tabular columns where all rows are filled, when it comes to real-world applications we often get datasets that are not unlike a typical city street (patchy, filled with potholes, and dotted with diversion signs). In these cases, we are generally faced with thousands of rows and columns that require a lot of clean up (for example, deciding what to keep and what to discard). This type of dataset is often referred to as a high dimensional dataset, and it can create a number of headaches. For example, this high dimensionality will significantly increase the training time of your machine learning model; making your model very complicated which in turn may lead to overfitting.

Tim Althoff is an assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research advances computational methods that leverage large-scale behavioral data to extract actionable insights about our lives, health and happiness through combining techniques from data science, social network analysis, and natural language processing. Tim holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, where he worked with Jure Leskovec. Prior to his PhD, Tim obtained M.S. and B.S. degrees from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He has received several fellowships and awards including the SAP Stanford Graduate Fellowship, Fulbright scholarship, German Academic Exchange Service scholarship, the German National Merit Foundation scholarship, a Best Paper Award by the International Medical Informatics Association, and the SIGKDD Dissertation Award 2019.

Gaussian processes are an effective model class for learning unknown functions, particularly in settings where accurately representing predictive uncertainty is of key importance. Motivated by applications in the physical sciences, the widely-used Mat\'ern class of Gaussian processes has recently been generalized to model functions whose domains are Riemannian manifolds, by re-expressing said processes as solutions of stochastic partial differential equations. In this work, we propose techniques for computing the kernels of these processes on compact Riemannian manifolds via spectral theory of the Laplace-Beltrami operator in a fully constructive manner, thereby allowing them to be trained via standard scalable techniques such as inducing point methods. We also extend the generalization from the Mat\'ern to the widely-used squared exponential Gaussian process. By allowing Riemannian Mat\'ern Gaussian processes to be trained using well-understood techniques, our work enables their use in mini-batch, online, and non-conjugate settings, and makes them more accessible to machine learning practitioners.

Supervised machine learning provides the learner with a set of input-output examples of the target task. Humans, however, can also learn to perform new tasks from instructions in natural language. Can machines learn to understand instructions as well? We present the Turking Test, which examines a model's ability to follow natural language instructions of varying complexity. These range from simple tasks, like retrieving the nth word of a sentence, to ones that require creativity, such as generating examples for SNLI and SQuAD in place of human intelligence workers ("turkers"). Despite our lenient evaluation methodology, we observe that a large pretrained language model performs poorly across all tasks. Analyzing the model's error patterns reveals that the model tends to ignore explicit instructions and often generates outputs that cannot be construed as an attempt to solve the task. While it is not yet clear whether instruction understanding can be captured by traditional language models, the sheer expressivity of instruction understanding makes it an appealing alternative to the rising few-shot inference paradigm.

Personalized recommendation based on multi-arm bandit (MAB) algorithms has shown to lead to high utility and efficiency as it can dynamically adapt the recommendation strategy based on feedback. However, unfairness could incur in personalized recommendation. In this paper, we study how to achieve user-side fairness in personalized recommendation. We formulate our fair personalized recommendation as a modified contextual bandit and focus on achieving fairness on the individual whom is being recommended an item as opposed to achieving fairness on the items that are being recommended. We introduce and define a metric that captures the fairness in terms of rewards received for both the privileged and protected groups. We develop a fair contextual bandit algorithm, Fair-LinUCB, that improves upon the traditional LinUCB algorithm to achieve group-level fairness of users. Our algorithm detects and monitors unfairness while it learns to recommend personalized videos to students to achieve high efficiency. We provide a theoretical regret analysis and show that our algorithm has a slightly higher regret bound than LinUCB. We conduct numerous experimental evaluations to compare the performances of our fair contextual bandit to that of LinUCB and show that our approach achieves group-level fairness while maintaining a high utility.

We propose a novel framework to perform classification via deep learning in the presence of noisy annotations. When trained on noisy labels, deep neural networks have been observed to first fit the training data with clean labels during an "early learning" phase, before eventually memorizing the examples with false labels. We prove that early learning and memorization are fundamental phenomena in high-dimensional classification tasks, even in simple linear models, and give a theoretical explanation in this setting. Motivated by these findings, we develop a new technique for noisy classification tasks, which exploits the progress of the early learning phase. In contrast with existing approaches, which use the model output during early learning to detect the examples with clean labels, and either ignore or attempt to correct the false labels, we take a different route and instead capitalize on early learning via regularization. There are two key elements to our approach. First, we leverage semi-supervised learning techniques to produce target probabilities based on the model outputs. Second, we design a regularization term that steers the model towards these targets, implicitly preventing memorization of the false labels. The resulting framework is shown to provide robustness to noisy annotations on several standard benchmarks and real-world datasets, where it achieves results comparable to the state of the art.

We give the first statistical-query lower bounds for agnostically learning any non-polynomial activation with respect to Gaussian marginals (e.g., ReLU, sigmoid, sign). For the specific problem of ReLU regression (equivalently, agnostically learning a ReLU), we show that any statistical-query algorithm with tolerance $n^{-(1/\epsilon)^b}$ must use at least $2^{n^c} \epsilon$ queries for some constant $b, c > 0$, where $n$ is the dimension and $\epsilon$ is the accuracy parameter. Our results rule out general (as opposed to correlational) SQ learning algorithms, which is unusual for real-valued learning problems. Our techniques involve a gradient boosting procedure for "amplifying" recent lower bounds due to Diakonikolas et al. (COLT 2020) and Goel et al. (ICML 2020) on the SQ dimension of functions computed by two-layer neural networks. The crucial new ingredient is the use of a nonstandard convex functional during the boosting procedure. This also yields a best-possible reduction between two commonly studied models of learning: agnostic learning and probabilistic concepts.

In this paper, we propose an end-to-end graph learning framework, namely Iterative Deep Graph Learning (IDGL), for jointly and iteratively learning graph structure and graph embedding. The key rationale of IDGL is to learn a better graph structure based on better node embeddings, and vice versa (i.e., better node embeddings based on a better graph structure). Our iterative method dynamically stops when the learned graph structure approaches close enough to the graph optimized for the downstream prediction task. In addition, we cast the graph learning problem as a similarity metric learning problem and leverage adaptive graph regularization for controlling the quality of the learned graph. Finally, combining the anchor-based approximation technique, we further propose a scalable version of IDGL, namely IDGL-Anch, which significantly reduces the time and space complexity of IDGL without compromising the performance. Our extensive experiments on nine benchmarks show that our proposed IDGL models can consistently outperform or match the state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, IDGL can be more robust to adversarial graphs and cope with both transductive and inductive learning.

In recent years, deep neural networks have been successful in both industry and academia, especially for computer vision tasks. The great success of deep learning is mainly due to its scalability to encode large-scale data and to maneuver billions of model parameters. However, it is a challenge to deploy these cumbersome deep models on devices with limited resources, e.g., mobile phones and embedded devices, not only because of the high computational complexity but also the large storage requirements. To this end, a variety of model compression and acceleration techniques have been developed. As a representative type of model compression and acceleration, knowledge distillation effectively learns a small student model from a large teacher model. It has received rapid increasing attention from the community. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of knowledge distillation from the perspectives of knowledge categories, training schemes, teacher-student architecture, distillation algorithms, performance comparison and applications. Furthermore, challenges in knowledge distillation are briefly reviewed and comments on future research are discussed and forwarded.

Many practical tasks involve sampling sequentially without replacement (WoR) from a finite population of size $N$, in an attempt to estimate some parameter $\theta^\star$. Accurately quantifying uncertainty throughout this process is a nontrivial task, but is necessary because it often determines when we stop collecting samples and confidently report a result. We present a suite of tools for designing confidence sequences (CS) for $\theta^\star$. A CS is a sequence of confidence sets $(C_n)_{n=1}^N$, that shrink in size, and all contain $\theta^\star$ simultaneously with high probability. We first exploit a relationship between Bayesian posteriors and martingales to construct a (frequentist) CS for the parameters of a hypergeometric distribution. We then present Hoeffding- and empirical-Bernstein-type time-uniform CSs and fixed-time confidence intervals for sampling WoR which improve on previous bounds in the literature.