Karthik Narasimhan-Language-guided machine learning

This talk was held on October 06, 2022 as a part of the MLFL series, hosted by the Center for Data Science, UMass Amherst.


Abstract of the Talk:
In modern machine learning, language has predominantly been treated as just another modality for applying statistical techniques. The question of ‘what can natural language provide for machine learning’ remains relatively underexplored. Humans have used language for centuries as a means of encoding and communicating task and domain knowledge – how can we similarly leverage such knowledge to train machines? In this talk, I will describe some of our recent attempts at language-guided machine learning for the paradigms of both supervised and reinforcement learning (RL). Specifically, I will show how language can be used to provide more semantic supervision to improve generalization and to help RL agents learn efficiently and safely.


About the Speaker:
Karthik Narasimhan is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at Princeton University. His research spans the areas of natural language processing and reinforcement learning, with the goal of building intelligent agents that learn to operate in the world through both their own experience (”doing things”) and leveraging existing human knowledge (”reading about things”). Karthik received his PhD from MIT in 2017, and spent a year as a visiting research scientist at OpenAI, contributing to the development of the GPT language model, prior to joining Princeton in 2018. He is the recipient of a Google Research Scholar Award (2022), an Amazon research award (2019) and best paper awards/nominations at EMNLP (2015, 2016).


About Machine Learning and Friends Lunch:


MLFL is a lively and interactive forum held weekly where friends of the UMass Amherst machine learning community can sit down, have lunch, and give or hear a 50-minute presentation on recent machine learning research.
This semester of the UMass MLFL series has been graciously sponsored by our friends at [Sponsor name(Oracle Labs)].


Please follow this link to know more about the past and upcoming talks: http://umass-mlfl.github.io