Machine Learning with Guarantees

As adoption of machine learning grows in high-stakes application areas (e.g., industry, government and health care), so does the need for guarantees: how accurate a learned model will be; whether its predictions will be fair; whether it will divulge information about individuals; or whether it is vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Many of these questions involve unknown or intractable quantities (e.g., risk, regret or posterior likelihood) and complex constraints (e.g., differential privacy, fairness, and adversarial robustness). Thus, learning algorithms are often designed to yield (and optimize) bounds on the quantities of interest. Beyond providing guarantees, these bounds also shed light on black-box machine learning systems.

Classical examples include structural risk minimization (Vapnik, 1991) and support vector machines (Cristianini & Shawe-Taylor, 2000), while more recent examples include non-vacuous risk bounds for neural networks (Dziugaite & Roy, 2017, 2018), algorithms that optimize both the weights and structure of a neural network (Cortes, 2017), counterfactual risk minimization for learning from logged bandit feedback (Swaminathan & Joachims, 2015; London & Sandler, 2019), robustness to adversarial attacks (Schmidt et al., 2018; Wong & Kolter, 2018), differentially private learning (Dwork et al., 2006, Chaudhuri et al., 2011), and algorithms that ensure fairness (Dwork et al., 2012).

This one-day workshop will bring together researchers in both theoretical and applied machine learning, across areas such as statistical learning theory, adversarial learning, fairness and privacy, to discuss the problem of obtaining performance guarantees and algorithms to optimize them. The program will include invited and contributed talks, poster sessions and a panel discussion. We particularly welcome contributions describing fundamentally new problems, novel learning principles, creative bound optimization techniques, and empirical studies of theoretical findings.