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</span></span>.</p>
<p>The many volunteers, the online-only nature of the event, and the low registration fees also allowed for what felt like a very diverse, inclusive event. Many graduate students and researchers from industry (like me), who do not generally have the time or the resources to travel to conferences like this, were able to attend, and make the exchanges richer.</p>
<p>In this post, I will try to give my impressions on the event, and share the most interesting events and papers I saw.</p>
<p>In this post, I will try to give my impressions on the event, the speakers, and the workshops that I could attend. I will do a quick recap of the most interesting papers I saw in a future post.</p>
<h1 id="the-format-of-the-virtual-conference">The Format of the Virtual Conference</h1>
<p>As a result of global travel restrictions, the conference was made fully-virtual. It was supposed to take place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, which is great for people who are often the target of restrictive visa policies in Northern American countries.</p>
<p>The thing I appreciated most about the conference format was its emphasis on <em>asynchronous</em> communication. Given how little time they had to plan the conference, they could have made all poster presentations via video-conference and call it a day. Instead, each poster had to record a 5-minute video<span><label for="sn-2" class="margin-toggle sidenote-number"></label><input type="checkbox" id="sn-2" class="margin-toggle" /><span class="sidenote">The videos are streamed using <a href="https://library.slideslive.com/">SlidesLive</a>, which is a great solution for synchronising videos and slides. It is very comfortable to navigate through the slides and synchronising the video to the slides and vice-versa. As a result, SlidesLive also has a very nice library of talks, including major conferences. This is much better than browsing YouTube randomly.<br />
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</span></span> where anyone could ask a question to the authors, or just show their appreciation for the work. This was a fantastic idea as it allowed any participant to interact with papers and authors at any time they please, which is especially important in a setting where people were spread all over the globe.</p>
<p>There were also Zoom session where authors were available for direct, face-to-face discussions, allowing for more traditional conversations. But asking questions on the channel had also the advantage of keeping a track of all questions that were asked by other people. As such, I quickly acquired the habit of watching the video, looking at the chat to see the previous discussions (even if they happened in the middle of the night in my timezone!), and then skimming the paper or asking questions myself.</p>
<p>All of these excellent ideas were implemented by an <a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/papers.html?filter=keywords">amazing website</a>, collecting all papers in a searchable, easy-to-use interface, and even a nice <a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/paper_vis.html">visualisation</a> of papers as a point cloud!</p>
<p>All of these excellent ideas were implemented by an <a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/papers.html?filter=keywords">amazing website</a>, collecting all papers in a searchable, easy-to-use interface, and even including a nice <a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/paper_vis.html">visualisation</a> of papers as a point cloud!</p>
<h1 id="speakers">Speakers</h1>
<p>Overall, there were 8 speakers (two for each day of the main conference). They made a 40-minute presentation, and then there was a Q&amp;A both via the chat and via Zoom. I only saw 4 of them, but I expect I will be watching the others in the near future.</p>
<p>Overall, there were 8 speakers (two for each day of the main conference). They made a 40-minute presentation, and then there was a Q&amp;A both via the chat and via Zoom. I only saw a few of them, but I expect I will be watching the others in the near future.</p>
<h2 id="prof.-leslie-kaelbling-doing-for-our-robots-what-nature-did-for-us">Prof. Leslie Kaelbling, <a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/speaker_2.html">Doing for Our Robots What Nature Did For Us</a></h2>
<p>This talk was fascinating. It is about robotics, and especially how to design the “software” of our robots. We want to program a robot in a way that it could work the best it can over all possible domains it can encounter. I loved the discussion on how to describe the space of distributions over domains, from the point of view of the robot factory:</p>
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<p>There are many ways to describe a policy (i.e. the software running in the robot’s head), and many ways to obtain them. If you are familiar with recent advances in reinforcement learning, this talk is a great occasion to take a step back, and review the relevant background ideas from engineering and control theory.</p>
<p>Finally, the most important take-away from this talk is the importance of <em>abstractions</em>. Whatever the methods we use to program our robots, we still need a lot of human insights to give them good structural biases. There are many more insights, on the cost of experience, (hierarchical) planning, learning constraints, etc, so I strongly encourage you to watch the talk!</p>
<h2 id="dr.-laurent-dinh-invertible-models-and-normalizing-flows">Dr. Laurent Dinh, <a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/speaker_4.html">Invertible Models and Normalizing Flows</a></h2>
<p>This is a talk about an area of ML research I do not know very well, but very clearly presented. I really like the approach of teaching a set of methods from a “historical”, personal point of view. Laurent Dinh shows us how he arrived at this topic, what he finds interesting, in a very personal and relatable manner. This has the double advantage of introducing us to a topic that he is passionate about, while also giving us a glimpse of a researcher’s process, without hiding the momentary disillusions and disappointments, but emphasising the great achievements. Normalizing flows are also very interesting because it is grounded in strong theoretical results, that brings together a lot of different methods.</p>
<p>This is a very clear presentation of an area of ML research I do not know very well. I really like the approach of teaching a set of methods from a “historical”, personal point of view. Laurent Dinh shows us how he arrived at this topic, what he finds interesting, in a very personal and relatable manner. This has the double advantage of introducing us to a topic that he is passionate about, while also giving us a glimpse of a researcher’s process, without hiding the momentary disillusions and disappointments, but emphasising the great achievements. Normalizing flows are also very interesting because it is grounded in strong theoretical results, that brings together a lot of different methods.</p>
<h2 id="profs.-yann-lecun-and-yoshua-bengio-reflections-from-the-turing-award-winners">Profs. Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, <a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/speaker_7.html">Reflections from the Turing Award Winners</a></h2>
<p>This talk was very interesting, and yet felt very familiar, as if I already saw a very similar one elsewhere. Especially for Yann LeCun, who clearly reuses the same slides for many presentations at various events. They both came back to their favourite subjects: self-supervised learning for Yann LeCun, and system 1/system 2 for Yoshua Bengio. All in all, they are very good speakers, and their presentations are always insightful. Yann LeCun gives a lot of references on recent technical advances, which is great if you want to go deeper in the approaches he recommends. Yoshua Bengio is also very good at broadening the debate around deep learning, and introducing very important concepts from cognitive science.</p>
<h2 id="prof.-michael-i.-jordan-the-decision-making-side-of-machine-learning-dynamical-statistical-and-economic-perspectives">Prof. Michael I. Jordan, <a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/speaker_8.html">The Decision-Making Side of Machine Learning: Dynamical, Statistical and Economic Perspectives</a></h2>
<p>TODO</p>
<h1 id="workshops">Workshops</h1>
<p>On Sunday, there were <a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/workshops.html">15 different workshops</a>. All of them were recorded, and are available on the website. As always, unfortunately, there are too many interesting things to watch everything, but I saw bits and pieces of different workshops.</p>
<h2 id="beyond-tabula-rasa-in-reinforcement-learning-agents-that-remember-adapt-and-generalize"><a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/workshops_12.html">Beyond ‘tabula rasa’ in reinforcement learning: agents that remember, adapt, and generalize</a></h2>
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</span></span> (even though very similar to his keynote talk) on causal priors for deep learning.</p>
<h2 id="bridging-ai-and-cognitive-science"><a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/workshops_4.html">Bridging AI and Cognitive Science</a></h2>
<p>Cognitive science is fascinating, and I believe that collaboration between ML practitioners and cognitive scientists will greatly help advance both fields. I only watched <a href="https://baicsworkshop.github.io/program/baics_45.html">Leslie Kaelbling’s presentation</a>, which echoes a lot of things from her talk at the main conference. It complements it nicely, with more focus on intelligence, especially <em>embodied</em> intelligence. I think she has the rights approach to relationships between AI and natural science, explicitly listing the things from her work that would be helpful to natural scientists, and things she wish she knew about natural intelligences. It raises many fascinating questions on ourselves, what we build, and what we understand. I felt it was very motivational!</p>
<p>Cognitive science is fascinating, and I believe that collaboration between ML practitioners and cognitive scientists will greatly help advance both fields. I only watched <a href="https://baicsworkshop.github.io/program/baics_45.html">Leslie Kaelbling’s presentation</a>, which echoes a lot of things from her talk at the main conference. It complements it nicely, with more focus on intelligence, especially <em>embodied</em> intelligence. I think she has the right approach to relationships between AI and natural science, explicitly listing the things from her work that would be helpful to natural scientists, and things she wish she knew about natural intelligences. It raises many fascinating questions on ourselves, what we build, and what we understand. I felt it was very motivational!</p>
<h2 id="integration-of-deep-neural-models-and-differential-equations"><a href="https://iclr.cc/virtual_2020/workshops_5.html">Integration of Deep Neural Models and Differential Equations</a></h2>
<p>I didn’t attend this workshop, but I think I will watch the presentations if I can find some time. I have found the intersection of differential equations and ML very interesting, ever since the famous <a href="https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7892-neural-ordinary-differential-equations">NeurIPS best paper</a> on Neural ODEs. I think that such improvements to ML theory from other fields in mathematics would be extremely beneficial to a better understanding of the systems we build.</p>
<p>I didn’t attend this workshop, but I think I will watch the presentations if I can find the time. I have found the intersection of differential equations and ML very interesting, ever since the famous <a href="https://papers.nips.cc/paper/7892-neural-ordinary-differential-equations">NeurIPS best paper</a> on Neural ODEs. I think that such improvements to ML theory from other fields in mathematics would be extremely beneficial to a better understanding of the systems we build.</p>
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