On generalisation and learning

8^th November 2023, 11:00 6th Floor Conference Room 605, EEE
Dr. Benjamin Guedj
UCL Centre for Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Generalisation is one of the essential problems in machine learning and foundational AI. The PAC-Bayes theory has emerged in the past two decades as a generic and flexible framework to study and enforce generalisation abilities of machine learning algorithms. It leverages the power of Bayesian inference and allows to derive new learning strategies. I will briefly present the key concepts of PAC-Bayes and highlight a few recent contributions from my group. I will also pinpoint how generalisation-driven principled approaches can help design frugal automated systems, which depend less on data -- this is at the core of a grant we obtained in 2023.

Biography

Dr. Benjamin Guedj is an Associate Professor and Principal Researcher at University College London (Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Department of Computer Science), a tenured research scientist at Inria (the top French research institute in mathematics and computer science), and a Turing Fellow with The Alan Turing Institute. Since 2020, he is the founder and scientific director of The Inria London Programme, a joint lab between France and the UK.
Dr. Benjamin Guedj conducts research in theoretical machine learning. He holds a PhD in mathematics from Sorbonne Université (Paris, France) and focuses on statistical learning theory, PAC-Bayes, computational statistics, generalisation for deep learning, among other topics. He has contributed over 60 research articles in statistics and machine learning, and over 100 presentations and keynotes in prime scientific forums. He has been the recipient of several competitive grants in Europe and France, is involved in programme committees of most of the machine learning venues and has received several awards including three consecutive best reviewer awards for NeurIPS. He is leading a research team across France and the UK and supervising 9 students, and is a member of the ELLIS society and a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Since 2022, Dr. Benjamin Guedj is a Young Leader of the Franco-British Council, and a Knight of the Order of the Academic Palms of the French Republic.

Additional Materials

• https://bguedj.github.io/publications/