Category: Conferences

Here are a few of the papers I enjoyed at ICML.

1. Steffen Bickel, Michael Brüeckner, Tobias Scheffer, Discriminative Learning for Differing Training and Test Distributions There is a nice trick in this paper: they predict the probability that an unlabeled sample is in the training set vs. the test set, and then use this prediction to importance weight labeled samples in the training set. This paper uses a specific parametric model, but the approach is easily generalized.
2. Steve Hanneke A Bound on the Label Complexity of Agnostic Active Learning This paper bounds the number of labels required by the A² algorithm for active learning in the agnostic case. Last year we figured out agnostic active learning was possible. This year, it’s quantified. Hopefull soon, it will be practical.
3. Sylvian Gelly, David Silver Combining Online and Offline Knowledge in UCT. This paper is about techniques for improving MoGo with various sorts of learning. MoGo has a fair claim at being the world’s best Go algorithm.

There were also a large number of online learning papers this year, especially if you count papers which use online learning techniques for optimization on batch datasets (as I do). This is expected, because larger datasets are becoming more common, and online learning makes more sense the larger the dataset. Many of these papers are of interest if your goal is learning fast while others are about extending online learning into new domains.

(Feel free to add any other papers of interest in the comments.)