Keller Colloquium in Computing and Mathematical Sciences

While deep learning has been hugely successful in producing highly accurate models, the resulting models are sometimes (i) difficult to interpret, (ii) susceptible to adversaries, and (iii) suffer from subtle implementation bugs due to their stochastic nature. In this talk, I will take some initial steps towards addressing these problems of interpretability, robustness, and correctness using some classic mathematical tools. First, influence functions from robust statistics can help us understand the predictions of deep networks by answering the question: which training examples are most influential on a particular prediction? Second, semidefinite relaxations can be used to provide guaranteed upper bounds on the amount of damage an adversary can do for restricted models. Third, we use the Lean proof assistant to produce a working implementation of stochastic computation graphs which is guaranteed to be bug-free.