[Statlist] Research Seminar in Statistics | *FRIDAY 12 APRIL 2024* | GSEM, University of Geneva

[gsem-support-instituts]

Dear all,

We are pleased to invite you to our next Research Seminar, organized by Professor Sebastian Engelke on behalf of the Research Center for Statistics
< https://www.unige.ch/gsem/en/research/institutes/rcs/team/ >.

FRIDAY 12 APRIL 2024, at 11:15 am, Uni Mail M 4220.

Learning to Act in Noisy Contexts Using Deep Proxy Learning
Arthur GRETTON, Computational Neuroscience Unit, Director of the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning (CSML) at UCL, UK
< https://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~gretton/ >

ABSTRACT:
We consider problem of evaluating the expected outcome of an action or policy, using off-policy observations of user actions, where the relevant context is noisy/anonymized. This scenario might arise due to privacy constraints, data bandwidth restrictions, or intrinsic properties of the setting.

We will employ the recently developed tool of proxy causal learning to address this problem. In brief, two noisy views of the context are used: one prior to the user action, and one subsequent to it, and influenced by the action. This pair of views will allow us to recover the average causal effect of an action under reasonable assumptions. As a key benefit of the proxy approach, we need never explicitly model or recover the hidden context. Our implementation employs learned neural net representations for both the action and context, allowing each to be complex and high dimensional (images, text). We demonstrate the deep proxy learning method in a setting where the action is an image, and show that we outperform an autoencoder-based alternative.

> View the Research Seminar agenda: < https://www.unige.ch/gsem/en/research/seminars/rcs/ >

Regards,


Marie-Madeleine

Marie-Madeleine Novo
Assistant to the Research Institutes
gsem-support-instituts at unige.ch