NeurIPS 2020

Back in February, when AI conferences were still held in-person, Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio shared a stage in New York at an AAAI event, which Syncedcovered in detail. LeCun told the audience that, after decades of skepticism, he had finally joined Hinton in support of the idea that self-supervised learning may usher in AI's next revolution. Unlike supervised learning, which requires manual data-labelling, self-supervised learning (SSL) is an approach that can automatically generate labels. Recent improvements in self-supervised training methods have established SSL as a serious alternative to traditional supervised training. Google's language representation model ALBERT for example utilizes a self-supervised training framework to leverage large amounts of text. It's no surprise then that NeurIPS 2020 (the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems) would find itself at the forefront of this trend.