OATML

Thirteen papers with OATML members accepted to NeurIPS 2021 main conference. More information in our blog post.

Seven papers with OATML members accepted to ICML 2021, together with 14 workshop papers. More information in our blog post.

OATML graduate student Lisa Schut presented alongside Rory McGrath, from Accenture Labs, on “Counterfactual Explanations: Making AI decision-making more useful and trustworthy.” The research presented was joint work with Oscar Key and Professor Yarin Gal, in collaboration with Accenture Labs.

Counterfactual explanations (CEs) are a practical tool for demonstrating why machine learning classifiers make particular decisions. For CEs to be useful, it is important that they are easy for users to interpret. Existing methods for generating interpretable CEs rely on auxiliary generative models, which may not be suitable for complex datasets, and incur engineering overhead. We introduce a simple and fast method for generating interpretable CEs in a white-box setting without an auxiliary model, by using the predictive uncertainty of the classifier. Our experiments show that our proposed algorithm generates more interpretable CEs, according to IM1 scores, than existing methods. Additionally, our approach allows us to estimate the uncertainty of a CE, which may be important in safety-critical applications, such as those in the medical domain.

We take a Bayesian perspective to illustrate a connection between training speed and the marginal likelihood in linear models. This provides two major insights: first, that a measure of a model's training speed can be used to estimate its marginal likelihood. Second, that this measure, under certain conditions, predicts the relative weighting of models in linear model combinations trained to minimize a regression loss. We verify our results in model selection tasks for linear models and for the infinite-width limit of deep neural networks. We further provide encouraging empirical evidence that the intuition developed in these settings also holds for deep neural networks trained with stochastic gradient descent. Our results suggest a promising new direction towards explaining why neural networks trained with stochastic gradient descent are biased towards functions that generalize well.

While deep learning algorithms can excel at predicting outcomes, they often act as black-boxes rendering them uninterpretable for healthcare practitioners. Counterfactual explanations (CEs) are a practical tool for demonstrating why machine learning models make particular decisions. We introduce a novel algorithm that leverages uncertainty to generate trustworthy counterfactual explanations for white-box models. Our proposed method can generate more interpretable CEs than the current benchmark (Van Looveren and Klaise, 2019) for breast cancer diagnosis. Further, our approach provides confidence levels for both the diagnosis as well as the explanation.

'Capsule' models try to explicitly represent the poses of objects, enforcing a linear relationship between an objects pose and those of its constituent parts. This modelling assumption should lead to robustness to viewpoint changes since the object-component relationships are invariant to the poses of the object. We describe a probabilistic generative model that encodes these assumptions. Our probabilistic formulation separates the generative assumptions of the model from the inference scheme, which we derive from a variational bound. We experimentally demonstrate the applicability of our unified objective, and the use of test time optimisation to solve problems inherent to amortised inference.

OATML group members and collaborators are proud to present 13 papers at NeurIPS 2021 main conference. …

OATML group members and collaborators are proud to present 21 papers at ICML 2021, including 7 papers at the main conference and 14 papers at various workshops. Group members will also be giving invited talks and participate in panel discussions at the workshops. …

OATML group members and collaborators are proud to be presenting 22 papers at NeurIPS 2020. Group members are also co-organising various events around NeurIPS, including workshops, the NeurIPS Meet-Up on Bayesian Deep Learning and socials. …

We are glad to share the following 13 papers by OATML authors and collaborators to be presented at this ICML conference and workshops …