OATML

Principled Bayesian deep learning (BDL) does not live up to its potential when we only focus on marginal predictive distributions (marginal predictives). Recent works have highlighted the importance of joint predictives for (Bayesian) sequential decision making from a theoretical and synthetic perspective. We provide additional practical arguments grounded in realworld applications for focusing on joint predictives: we discuss online Bayesian inference, which would allow us to make predictions while taking into account additional data without retraining, and we propose new challenging evaluation settings using active learning and active sampling. These settings are motivated by an examination of marginal and joint predictives, their respective cross-entropies, and their place in offline and online learning. They are more realistic than previously suggested ones, building on work by Wen et al. (2021) and Osband et al. (2022), and focus on evaluating the performance of approximate B... [full abstract]

We propose Active Surrogate Estimators (ASEs), a new method for label-efficient model evaluation. Evaluating model performance is a challenging and important problem when labels are expensive. ASEs address this active testing problem using a surrogate-based estimation approach, whereas previous methods have focused on Monte Carlo estimates. ASEs actively learn the underlying surrogate, and we propose a novel acquisition strategy, XWING, that tailors this learning to the final estimation task. We find that ASEs offer greater label-efficiency than the current state-of-the-art when applied to challenging model evaluation problems for deep neural networks. We further theoretically analyze ASEs' errors.

We challenge a common assumption underlying most supervised deep learning: that a model makes a prediction depending only on its parameters and the features of a single input. To this end, we introduce a general-purpose deep learning architecture that takes as input the entire dataset instead of processing one datapoint at a time. Our approach uses self-attention to reason about relationships between datapoints explicitly, which can be seen as realizing non-parametric models using parametric attention mechanisms. However, unlike conventional non-parametric models, we let the model learn end-to-end from the data how to make use of other datapoints for prediction. Empirically, our models solve cross-datapoint lookup and complex reasoning tasks unsolvable by traditional deep learning models. We show highly competitive results on tabular data, early results on CIFAR-10, and give insight into how the model makes use of the interactions between points.

We introduce active testing: a new framework for sample-efficient model evaluation. While approaches like active learning reduce the number of labels needed for model training, existing literature largely ignores the cost of labeling test data, typically unrealistically assuming large test sets for model evaluation. This creates a disconnect to real applications where test labels are important and just as expensive, e.g. for optimizing hyperparameters. Active testing addresses this by carefully selecting the test points to label, ensuring model evaluation is sample-efficient. To this end, we derive theoretically-grounded and intuitive acquisition strategies that are specifically tailored to the goals of active testing, noting these are distinct to those of active learning. Actively selecting labels introduces a bias; we show how to remove that bias while reducing the variance of the estimator at the same time. Active testing is easy to implement, effective, and can be applied to an... [full abstract]

OATML graduate students Lars Holdijk, Jannik Kossen, Clare Lyle, and Sören Mindermann are recognized as Highlighted Reviewers for their reviewing at ICLR 2022.

OATML graduate student Jannik Kossen receives a top reviewer award (top 10%) at AISTATS 2022.

Thirteen papers with OATML members accepted to NeurIPS 2021 main conference. More information in our blog post.

OATML graduate students Sebastian Farquhar and Jannik Kossen receive best reviewer awards (top 10%) at ICML 2021. Further, OATML graduate students Tim G. J. Rudner, Pascal Notin, Panagiotis Tigas, and Binxin Ru have served the conference as expert reviewers.

OATML graduate students Aidan Gomez, Jannik Kossen, and Neil Band will be presenting their recent paper Self-Attention Between Datapoints: Going Beyond Individual Input-Output Pairs in Deep Learning that introduces Non-Parametric Transformers at the Stanford Lecture Course ‘CS25: Transformers United’ on November 1, 2021. Professor Yarin Gal, Dr. Tom Rainforth, and OATML DPhil student Clare Lyle are co-authors on the paper.

The lecture is available online here.

OATML students Jannik Kossen and Neil Band will be presenting their recent paper Self-Attention Between Datapoints: Going Beyond Individual Input-Output Pairs in Deep Learning at Google Research on September 14, 2021. Professor Yarin Gal, Dr. Tom Rainforth, and OATML DPhil students Clare Lyle and Aidan Gomez are co-authors on the paper.

OATML DPhil student Jannik Kossen gives invited talks at AI Campus Berlin on two recent papers: Self-Attention Between Datapoints: Going Beyond Individual Input-Output Pairs in Deep Learning and Active Testing: Sample-Efficient Model Evaluation. Recordings of are available upon request. Announcements are here and here. Professor Yarin Gal, Dr. Tom Rainforth, and OATML graduate students Sebastian Farquhar, Neil Band, Clare Lyle, and Aidan Gomez are co-authors on the papers.

Seven papers with OATML members accepted to ICML 2021, together with 14 workshop papers. More information in our blog post.

OATML students Jannik Kossen and Neil Band present their recent paper Self-Attention Between Datapoints: Going Beyond Individual Input-Output Pairs in Deep Learning at Cohere on July 9, 2021. Professor Yarin Gal, Dr. Tom Rainforth, and OATML DPhil students Clare Lyle and Aidan Gomez are also co-authors on the paper.

OATML group members and collaborators are proud to present 8 papers at NeurIPS 2022 main conference, and 11 workshop papers. …

OATML group members and collaborators are proud to present 11 papers at the ICML 2022 main conference and workshops. Group members are also co-organizing the Workshop on Computational Biology, and the Oxford Wom*n Social. …

OATML group members and collaborators are proud to present 13 papers at NeurIPS 2021 main conference. …

OATML group members and collaborators are proud to present 21 papers at ICML 2021, including 7 papers at the main conference and 14 papers at various workshops. Group members will also be giving invited talks and participate in panel discussions at the workshops. …