Call for Contributions

============================
NIPS 2014 Workshop on Perturbations, Optimization, and Statistics

December 12 at Montreal, Canada.
Web Site: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~dtarlow/pos14/

Submission Deadline: November 9, 2014
============================

== Overview ==
In nearly all machine learning tasks, decisions must be made given current 
knowledge (e.g., choose which label to predict). Perhaps surprisingly, always 
making the best decision is not always the best strategy, particularly while 
learning. Recently, there is an emerging body of work on learning under 
different rules that apply perturbations to the decision procedure. These works 
provide simple and efficient learning rules with improved theoretical 
guarantees. This workshop will bring together the growing community of 
researchers interested in different aspects of this area, and it will broaden 
our understanding of why and how perturbation methods can be useful.
In the last couple of years, at the highly successful NIPS workshops on 
Perturbations, Optimization, and Statistics, we looked at how injecting 
perturbations (whether it be random or adversarial “noise”) into learning and 
inference procedures can be beneficial. The focus was on two angles: first, on 
how stochastic perturbations can be used to construct new types of probability 
models for structured data; and second, how deterministic perturbations affect 
the regularization and the generalization properties of learning algorithms.

== Call for Papers ==
In addition to a program of invited presentations, we solicit contribution of 
short papers that explore perturbation-based methods in the context of topics 
such as: statistical modeling, sampling, inference, estimation, theory, robust 
optimization, robust learning. We are interested in both theoretical and 
application-oriented works. We also welcome papers that explore connections 
between alternative ways of using perturbations.

Contributed papers should adhere to the NIPS format and be up to four pages 
long (without counting the list of references). Papers submitted for review do 
not need to be anonymized. There will be no official proceedings. Thus, apart 
from papers reporting novel unpublished work, we also welcome submissions
describing work in progress or summarizing a longer paper under review for a 
journal or conference (this should be clearly stated though). Accepted papers 
will be presented as posters; some may also be selected for spotlight talks.

Please submit papers in PDF format by email to 
[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>. The submission deadline is 
November 9, 2014 and notifications of acceptance will be sent by November 16, 
2014. At least one of the authors must be attending the workshop to present the 
work.

== Confirmed Invited Speakers ==
Manfred Warmuth (UCSC), Jake Abernethy (U of Michigan), Andreea Gane (MIT), Ian 
Goodfellow (Google).

== Organizers ==
Tamir Hazan (U of Haifa), George Papandreou (TTI-C), Danny Tarlow (Microsoft 
Research).
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