When I was coming up, conferences were a mature technology for disseminating high-quality scientific results at higher speed than journals.  The combination of smaller units of work (“one paper, one idea”) and focused peer review were part of the key ingredients. Unfortunately the process is now broken. Arxiv halps fill the gap, but remains caveat...

This slide is from Leon Bottou's amazing ICML 2015 keynote.  You should contemplate this image on a regular basis. In the above slide Leon Bottou outlines three distinct, valid, and complementary ways of attempting to understand the world.  In AI all of these approaches are used, but with different emphasis as trends change.  Arguably, there was too...

Here's an example of a research question that started as a practical concern and ended up having science-fiction levels of potential. A Practical Question and Answer Contextual bandits have developed from research prototype to maturing industrial technology. CBs are practical because they incorporate the partial feedback nature of decision making...

This blog post is about improved off-policy contextual bandit learning via distributional robustness. I'll provide some theoretical background and also outline the implementation in vowpal wabbit. Some of this material is in a NeurIPS expo talk video, and additional material is in the accepted paper. Motivation In off-policy learning in contextual...

If you need to solve a convex optimization problem nowadays, you are in great shape. Any problem of the form $$ \begin{alignat}{2} &\!\inf_z & \qquad & f(z) \\ & \text{subject to} & & h(z) = 0 \\ & & & g(z) \preceq 0 \end{alignat} $$ where $f$ and $g$ are convex and $h$ is affine can be attacked by several excellent...

ICLR 2019 was reminiscent of the early NeurIPS days (sans skiing): a single track of talks, vibrant poster sessions, and a large mid-day break. The Tuesday morning talks were on climate change, modeling proteins, generating music, and modeling the visual cortex. Except for climate change, these were all hot topics at NeurIPS in the late 1990s. History...