Machine learning and learning theory research
I ve found agentic coding (with Anthropic s Claude) to be something between an x10 and x100 multiplier on what I personally can do in a software engineering vein. This seems to be significantly more than what other folks are observing, so I wanted to share some notes on how I got there in case of broader Continue reading "Agentic Coding Ascension Notes"
(Dylan Foster and Alex Lamb both helped in creating this.) In thinking about what are good research problems, it’s sometimes helpful to switch from what is understood to what is clearly possible. This encourages us to think beyond simply improving the existing system. For example, we have seen instances throughout the history of machine learning Continue reading "Headroom for AI development"
The stark success of OpenAI s GPT4 model surprised me shifting my view from really good autocomplete (roughly inline with intuitions here) to a dialog agent exhibiting a significant scope of reasoning and intelligence. Some of the MSR folks did a fairly thorough study of capabilities which seems like a good reference. I think of GPT4 Continue reading "An AI Miracle Malcontent"
By: Stefanie Jegelka and Ameet Talwalkar (ICML21 Communication Chairs) With ICML 2021 underway, we wanted to briefly highlight the upcoming invited talks. A general theme of the invited talks this year is “machine learning for science.” The Program Chairs (Marina Meila and Tong Zhang) have invited world-renowned scientists from various disciplines to discuss their problems Continue reading "ICML…
Welcome to ALT Highlights, a series of blog posts spotlighting various happenings at the recent conference ALT 2021, including plenary talks, tutorials, trends in learning theory, and more! To reach a broad audience, the series will be disseminated as guest posts on different blogs in machine learning and theoretical computer science. John has been kind Continue reading "ALT Highlights An…
I enjoyed my conversations with Timnit when she was in the MSR-NYC lab, so her situation has been on my mind throughout NeurIPS. Piecing together what happened second-hand is always tricky, but Jeff Dean s account and Timnit s agree on a basic outline. Timnit and others wrote a paper for FAccT which was approved for submission Continue reading "What is the Right Response to Employer Misbehavior in…
This post is cross-listed on the CMU ML blog. The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is a flagship machine learning conference that in 2020 received 4,990 submissions and managed a pool of 3,931 reviewers and area chairs. Given that the stakes in the review process are high the careers of researchers are often significantly Continue reading "Experiments with the ICML 2020…
Last week at ICML 2020, Mikael Henaff, Akshay Krishnamurthy, John Langford and I had a paper on a new reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm that solves three key problems in RL: (i) global exploration, (ii) decoding latent dynamics, and (iii) optimizing a given reward function. Our ICML poster is here. The paper is a bit mathematically heavy in nature so this Continue reading "HOMER: Provable…
I spent the last month becoming a connoisseur of digital contact tracing approaches since this seems like something where I might be able to help. Many other people have been thinking along similar lines (great), but I also see several misconceptions that even smart and deeply involved people are making. For the following a key Continue reading "Critical issues in digital contract tracing"
Disclaimer: I am not an epidemiologist, but there is an interesting potentially important pattern in the data that seems worth understanding. World healthcare authorities appear to be primarily shifting towards Social Distancing. However, there is potential to pursue a different strategy in the medium term that exploits a vulnerability of this disease: the 5 day Continue reading "What is the most…