Fundamental Components of Deep Learning: A category-theoretic approach

Date(s): Wednesday 20th September 2023 (10:00-11:00)
Contact: Event Convenor Contact: A.M.Kasprzyk@nottingham.ac.uk
Description: Speaker's Name: Bruno Gavranović
Speaker's Affiliation: Strathclyde
Speaker's Research Theme(s): Symbolic computational mathematics,Computational statistics and machine learning
Abstract:
Deep learning, despite its remarkable achievements, is still a young field. Like the early stages of many scientific disciplines, it is permeated by ad-hoc design decisions. From the intricacies of the implementation of backpropagation, through new and poorly understood phenomena such as double descent, scaling laws or in-context learning, to a growing zoo of neural network architectures - there are few unifying principles in deep learning, and no uniform and compositional mathematical foundation. In this talk I'll present a novel perspective on deep learning by utilising the mathematical framework of category theory. I'll identify two main conceptual components of neural networks, report on progress made throughout last years by the research community in formalising them, and show how they've been used to describe backpropagation, architectures, and supervised learning in general, shedding a new light on the existing field.

Venue: Zoom
Online Conference Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84644928641?pwd=Vm5UNy8xdnk0WnhBeVlSSXVlK2Y5UT09

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