SCS Seminar Talk: Aditi Raghunathan

TITLE: Rethinking the Role of Data in Robust Machine Learning

ABSTRACT:

Despite notable successes on several carefully controlled benchmarks, current machine learning (ML) systems are remarkably brittle, raising serious concerns about their deployment in safety-critical applications like self-driving cars and predictive healthcare. In this talk, I discuss fundamental obstacles to building robust ML systems and develop principled approaches that form the foundations of robust ML. In particular, I will focus on the role of data and demonstrate the need to question common assumptions when improving robustness to (i) adversarial examples and (ii) spurious correlations. On the one hand, I will describe how and why naively using more data can surprisingly hurt performance in these settings. On the other hand, I will show that unlabeled data, when harnessed in the right fashion, is extremely beneficial and enables state-of-the-art robustness. In closing, I will discuss how to build on the foundations of robust ML and achieve wide-ranging robustness in various domains including natural language processing and vision.

BIO:

Aditi Raghunathan is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at Stanford University advised by Percy Liang. She is interested in building robust machine learning systems with guarantees for trustworthy real-world deployment. Her research in robustness has been recognized by a Google Ph.D. Fellowship in Machine Learning and the Open Philanthropy AI Fellowship. Among other honors, she is also the recipient of the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship and the Stanford School of Engineering Fellowship.

JOIN THE TALK HERE: https://bluejeans.com/946032411