[Lisa_teatalk] Two tea talks this week: Coline Devin on Wednesday and Yoshua Bengio on Friday

Kyung Hyun Cho cho.k.hyun at gmail.com
Tue Jul 29 14:57:57 EDT 2014


Dear all,

I have some last minute changes to the schedule of tea talks this week:

(1) Colin Devin's Tea Talk on Wednesday at 13.00 (AA3195)
(2) Yoshua Bengio's Tea Talk on Friday at 13.00 (AA3195)

The first one is the already announced one, and there is no change. The
second one has been scheduled this morning, and Yoshua will tell us about
his new idea on a new learning criterion for deep neural networks.

I'm attaching the abstract by Yoshua at the end of this email.

Best,
- Cho

===

Speaker: Prof. Yoshua Bengio (University of Montreal)
Title: How Auto-Encoders Could Provide Credit Assignment in Deep Networks
via Target Propagation
Abstract:
We discuss the usefulness and rationality of optimism in general sequential
decision making. Humans are often optimistically biased and optimists are
achieving more of their ambitions than more rational people. We provide a
mathematical analysis of general optimistic agents and identify how they
can be better or worse than strictly rational agents. These agents select
the most optimistic among the still plausible hypotheses from a class.
Further, we discuss a milder form of optimism in the case of continuously
parameterized classes. We refer to this setting as reward-modulated
inference, a framework that includes recent models for synaptic weight
updates in neuroscience as a special case. At the center is a trade-off
between assigning high probability to likable or likely events. A nice
consequence is that we can formulate generative and discriminative learning
as endpoints of a continuum. Finally, I present some first experiments
using autoencoders for the classical MNIST task showing a very simple way
of getting ok but not state-of-the art accuracy. The aim is not to optimize
narrow tasks maximally but to be able to achieve the law of effect, making
choices with a frequency proportional to past rewards in situations deemed
similar. In really complex tasks this can be a sufficient objective and one
that humans and animals often settle for. Also, the strategy provides
suitable exploration as well as robustness to change.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://webmail.iro.umontreal.ca/pipermail/lisa_teatalk/attachments/20140729/6ec3ede1/attachment.html 


More information about the Lisa_teatalk mailing list