Workshop on Scientific Methods for Understanding Deep Learning

Workshop at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024

While deep learning continues to achieve impressive results on an ever-growing range of tasks, our understanding of the principles underlying these successes remains largely limited. This problem is usually tackled from a mathematical point of view, aiming to prove rigorous theorems about optimization or generalization errors of standard algorithms, but so far they have been limited to overly-simplified settings. The main goal of this workshop is to promote a complementary approach that is centered on the use of the scientific method, which forms hypotheses and designs controlled experiments to test them. More specifically, it focuses on empirical analyses of deep networks that can validate or falsify existing theories and assumptions, or answer questions about the success or failure of these models. This approach has been largely underexplored, but has great potential to further our understanding of deep learning and to lead to significant progress in both theory and practice. The secondary goal of this workshop is to build a community of researchers, currently scattered in several subfields, around the common goal of understanding deep learning through a scientific lens.

Accepted papers: OpenReview.
Videos of talks and panel session: NeurIPS website.
The workshop was held on Sunday, December 15th in West meeting rooms 205-207.
For latest news about the workshop, follow @scifordl on X/Twitter.


Keynote Speakers

Zico Kolter

Carnegie Mellon University
 
 

Hanie Sedghi

Google DeepMind
 
 

Misha Belkin

UC San Diego & Amazon
 

Surya Ganguli

Stanford University
 
 

Tom Goldstein

University of Maryland
 
 

Panelists

Yasaman Bahri

Google DeepMind
 
 

Andrew Gordon Wilson

New York University
 
 

Misha Belkin

UC San Diego & Amazon
 

Eero Simoncelli

New York University
 
 

Surya Ganguli

Stanford University
 
 

Organizers

Zahra Kadkhodaie

Flatiron Institute & New York University
 
 
 

Florentin Guth

Flatiron Institute & New York University
 
 
 

Sanae Lotfi

New York University
 
 
 

Davis Brown

UPenn & Pacific Northwest National Lab
 
 
 

Micah Goldblum

Columbia University
 
 
 

Valentin De Bortoli

Google DeepMind
 
 
 

Andrew Saxe

UCL
 
 


Questions?

Contact us at scienceofdl.workshop.2024@gmail.com or @scifordl.

Sponsors

We thank the Simons Foundation for their generous financial support.
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