I’m a fan of Peggy Gou . While listening to one of her songs ( Han Jan ), I realized I could actually understand it (because it’s the simplest song she has lyric-wise :P). I googled for the english lyrics and there were none. All I found was this reddit post : Hey dudes me and my girl here are high and were digging this new Peggy Gou song but we wanted to sing the lyrics without being like totally…
Imagine I just lost a game of chess. You might infer that I’m disappointed or not very good at chess. Without any additional information, you probably wouldn’t infer that I wanted to lose the game. Yet, that is the inference that most inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods would make. Nearly all of them assume, incorrectly, that the human is (approximately) rational. Unsurprisingly, an…
Pearl frequently refers to what he calls a “causal ladder”, a hierarchy of three types of problems of increasing difficulty: (1) prediction (2) intervention, and (3) counterfactuals. If we wish to ascend the so-called ladder, and increase the range of causal questions we can answer, it is crucial to understand what makes each level more difficult than the last and what additional knowledge we need…
I had a traditional Thanksgiving — a puja at our family friend’s house, which as per tradition, we (minus my mom) skipped in order to smoothly arrive at noon, just before the food is served. But as we walk in and hear the sanskrit chanting, we realize, as per tradition, our attempts have been foiled because everything is running on the usual Indian Standard Time. Somehow, even after a lifetime to…
She stared at the keys of her laptop. It wasn’t that she had nothing to write about—so much had happened. Her mind had effortfully packaged the ideas into words that were ready to be transmitted. However, her hands, which rested upon her keyboard, remained unresponsive, deaf to the requests sent by the mental authorities, or perhaps merely pretending to be deaf, already acting in allegiance with a…
There’s a lot of research advice out there, but not much focused specifically on undergrads. So here I’ve tried outlining undergrad-focused tips. Consider trying other options (e.g. software internship) first. Some types of research will require more advanced knowledge that you probably won’t have yet as, say, a freshman, so try other options earlier. I would especially recommend becoming fast and…
A friend recently asked me why I find bounded optimality interesting. Here’s why: It is necessary to have a normative framework for how agents should act under computational pressure because this is what the real world is like. In the real world an agent should understand not to think long when it is about to get hit by a car, but should definitely perform more computation before declaring war.…
Language modeling is important for almost all natural language processing tasks: speech recognition, spelling correction, machine translation, etc. Today I’ll go over Kneser-Ney smoothing, a historically important technique for language model smoothing. Language Models A language model estimates the probability of an n-gram from a training corpus. The simplest way to get a probability distribution…