Building Reproducible, Reusable, and Robust Machine Learning Software

We have seen significant achievements with machine learning in recent years. Yet reproducing results for state-of-the-art deep learning methods is seldom straightforward. High variance of some methods can make learning particularly difficult. Furthermore, results can be brittle to even minor perturbations in the domain or experimental procedure. In this talk, I will review challenges that arise in 
experimental techniques and reporting procedures in deep learning, with a particular focus on reinforcement learning. I will also describe several recent results and guidelines designed to make future results more reproducible, reusable and robust.

Bio

Dr. Joelle Pineau is an Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar at McGill University where she co-directs the Reasoning and Learning Lab. She also leads the Facebook AI Research lab in Montreal, Canada. She holds a BASc in Engineering from the University of Waterloo, and an MSc and PhD in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Pineau's research focuses on developing new models and algorithms for planning and learning in complex partially-observable domains. She also works on applying these algorithms to complex problems in robotics, health care, games and conversational agents. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and the Journal of Machine Learning Research and is currently President of the International Machine Learning Society. She is a recipient of NSERC's E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship (2018), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and in 2016 was named a member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists by the Royal Society of Canada.