UW-Madison Computer Sciences Assistant Professor Yingyu Liang has been awarded a prestigious NSF Career Award. The award is for “better understanding, robustness, and efficiency of deep learning.”
Liang will be developing new theoretical models of properties of practical data and providing frameworks for proving performance guarantees, including for learning in the presence of adversarial attacks or limited labeled data. He will also design new learning methods that are provably more robust and labeled-data efficient. This direction is still largely unexplored, despite significant recent research activities. The proposed research can be transformational for modern intelligent systems by laying the foundations for further development. It will also help to solve new theoretical problems from practice that are not adequately addressed by current theory and will have lasting impacts on machine learning and optimization.