Events Calendar

YINS Seminar: Daniel Hsu (Columbia)

Weekly Seminar
Event time: 
Wednesday, October 6, 2021 - 12:00pm
Event description: 

YINS Seminar

“Contrastive learning, multi-view redundancy, and linear models”

Speaker: Daniel Hsu
Columbia University

Abstract:  Contrastive learning is a “self-supervised” approach to representation learning that uses naturally occurring similar and dissimilar pairs of data points to find useful embeddings of data. We study contrastive learning in the context of multi-view statistical models. First, we show that whenever the views of the data are approximately redundant in their ability to predict a target function, a low-dimensional embedding obtained via contrastive learning affords a linear predictor with near-optimal predictive accuracy. Second, we show that in the context of topic models, the embedding can be interpreted as a linear transformation of the posterior moments of the hidden topic distribution given the observed words. We also empirically demonstrate that linear classifiers with these representations perform well in document classification tasks with very few labeled examples in a semi-supervised setting.  

This is joint work with Akshay Krishnamurthy (MSR) and Christopher Tosh (Columbia).  

Speaker Bio: Daniel Hsu is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and a member of the Data Science Institute, both at Columbia University. Previously, he was a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England, and the Departments of Statistics at Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC San Diego, and a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC Berkeley. He was selected by IEEE Intelligent Systems as one of “AI’s 10 to Watch” in 2015 and received a 2016 Sloan Research Fellowship. Daniel’s research interests are in algorithmic statistics and machine learning.  

To participate:
Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://yale.zoom.us/j/93949928143
     Or Telephone:203-432-9666 (2-ZOOM if on-campus) or 646 568 7788
     Meeting ID: 939 4992 8143
     International numbers available: https://yale.zoom.us/u/af5ZYLPKB

.