ML Seminar - Modeling Uncertainty in Learning with Little Data

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Published:
May 14, 2020

Few-shot classification, the task of adapting a classifier to unseen classes given a small labeled dataset, is an important step on the path toward human-like machine learning. I will present what I think are some of the key advances and open questions in this area. I will then focus on the fundamental issue of overfitting in the few-shot scenario. Bayesian methods are well-suited to tackling this issue because they allow practitioners to specify prior beliefs and update those beliefs in light of observed data. Contemporary approaches to Bayesian few-shot classification maintain a posterior distribution over model parameters, which is slow and requires storage that scales with model size. Instead, we propose a Gaussian process classifier based on a novel combination of Pólya-gamma augmentation and the one-vs-each loss that allows us to efficiently marginalize over functions rather than model parameters. We demonstrate improved accuracy and uncertainty quantification on both standard few-shot classification benchmarks and few-shot domain transfer tasks.

The seminar was delivered live using Zoom on 5/7/20. 

 

Bio: Richard Zemel is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he has been a faculty member since 2000. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and Psychology at the University of Arizona and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute and at Carnegie Mellon University. He received a B.Sc. degree in History & Science from Harvard University in 1984 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1993. He is also the co-founder of SmartFinance, a financial technology startup specializing in data enrichment and natural language processing.

His awards include an NVIDIA Pioneers of AI Award, a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research, a Presidential Scholar Award, two NSERC Discovery Accelerators, and seven Dean’s Excellence Awards at the University of Toronto. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and is on the Executive Board of the Neural Information Processing Society, which runs the premier international machine learning conference.

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