AI Lunch and Seminar

Jun Zhu - Scalable Bayesian Inference with Posterior Regularization

Bayesian methods represent one important type of statistical methods for learning, inference and decision making. At the core is Bayes' theorem, which has been developed for more than 250 years. However, in the Big Data era, many challenges need to be addressed, ranging from theory, algorithm, and applications. In this talk, I will introduce some recent developments on Bayesian inference with posterior regularization, which can incorporate rich side information such as the large-margin property we like to impose on the model distribution for accurate prediction, or the domain knowledge collected from experts or crowds for good interpretation, and scalable online learning and distributed inference algorithms. When applied to deep generative models, we are able to significantly improve the prediction accuracy without sacrificing the generative performance.

Bio

Dr. Jun Zhu is an associate professor at Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, and an adjunct faculty at Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tsinghua in 2009. Before joining Tsinghua in 2011, he did post-doctoral research in CMU. His research interest lies in developing scalable machine learning methods to understand complex scientific and engineering data. Dr. Zhu has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers in the prestigious conferences and journals. He is an associate editor for IEEE Trans. on PAMI. He served as area chair for ICML, NIPS, UAI, IJCAI and AAAI. He was a local chair of ICML 2014. He is a recipient of the IEEE Intelligent Systems "AI's 10 to Watch" Award, NSFC Excellent Young Scholar Award, and CCF Young Scientist Award. His work is supported by the "221 Basic Research Plan for Young Talents" at Tsinghua.