Past Event: Oden Institute Seminar

Incorporating Structure into Machine Learning - TIME Changed

Osbert Bastani, Research assistant professor, University of Pennsylvania.

Abstract

While modern deep learning algorithms have proven to be surprisingly powerful, their unstructured nature has posed challenges that are difficult to overcome. I will talk about two projects aiming to address some of these challenges. First, safety is a major obstacle to using controllers based on reinforcement learning on real robots. I will describe how to use structured models---in particular, decision trees---to enable safe reinforcement learning. Second, deep generative models have difficulty capturing global structure in images such as repetitions and symmetries. I will describe how to incorporate programmatic structure into these models to capture global structure. Bio Osbert Bastani is a research assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is broadly interested in research at the intersection of machine learning and programming languages, and is currently working on trustworthy machine learning.