Friday Dec 11th 2020

Differential Geometry meets Deep Learning

NeurIPS 2020 Workshop

About

Recent years have seen a surge in research at the intersection of differential geometry and deep learning, including techniques for stochastic optimization on curved spaces (e.g., hyperbolic or spherical manifolds), learning embeddings for non-Euclidean data, and generative modelling on Riemannian manifolds. Insights from differential geometry have led to new state of the art approaches to modelling complex real world data, such as graphs with hierarchical structure, 3D medical data, and meshes. Thus, it is of critical importance to understand, from a geometric lens, the natural invariances, equivariances, and symmetries that reside within data.

In order to support the burgeoning interest of differential geometry in deep learning, the primary goal for this workshop is to facilitate community building and to work towards the identification of key challenges in comparison with regular deep learning, along with techniques to overcome these challenges. With many new researchers beginning projects in this area, we hope to bring them together to consolidate this fast-growing area into a healthy and vibrant subfield. In particular, we aim to strongly promote novel and exciting applications of differential geometry for deep learning with an emphasis on bridging theory to practice which is reflected in our choices of invited speakers, which include both machine learning practitioners and researchers who are primarily geometers.

Imperial College London

University of Amsterdam and Qualcomm Research

UC Santa Barbara

Princeton

Organizers

McGill/MILA

University of Oxford

University of Oxford

Stanford

University of Wisconsin