October 24, 2024

Exploring Geometry-Grounded Representation Learning and Generative Modeling: Key Insights from the ELLIS GRaM Workshop at ICML 2024

ELLIS Workshop on Geometry-grounded Representation Learning and Generative Modeling (GRaM Workshop) was convened in conjunction with the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2024 in Vienna from 27 July 2024. The ELLIS flagship workshop was attended by over 300 in-person as well as online participants. To date, it is the first workshop focusing on the principle of grounding in geometry, which is defined as ‘a representation, method, or theory is grounded in geometry if it can be amenable to geometric reasoning, that is, it abides by the mathematics of geometry and physics.’ The workshop consists of five invited talks, five contributed talks originating from the best submissions, and a panel discussion.

The following experts participated in the engaging panel discussion ‘Geometric deep learning and Generative modeling: Past and Future‘:

  • Max Welling, Professor Machine Learning, University of Amsterdam;
  • Zahra Kadkhodaie, Research Fellow at Center for Computational Neuroscience at the Flatiron Institute;
  • Joey Bose, Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford;
  • Nina Miolane, Assistant Professor at the University of California;

The keynote talks featured two top-notch speakers:

  • ‘The Platonic Representation Hypothesis’ delivered by Phillip Isola, The Class of 1948 Career Development associate professor in EECS at MIT;
  • ‘Automatic Symmetry Discovery from Data’ by Rose Yu, Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California;

The workshop also accepted submissions that present theoretical research, methodologies, applications, insightful analysis, and even open problems, within the topics of Structure-preserving learning, Structure-inducing learning, Generative modeling and density estimation, and Grounding in theory.

The total number of submissions was 167, and the accepted submissions were 145 across 4 categories: full proceedings papers, extended abstract papers, blogpost/tutorials, and competition track. From the submissions, five contributed talks were selected by Area Chairs for works with high reviewer scores, novelty, and relevance to the workshop. From the shortlisted papers, two best papers were selected, meanwhile, the workshop acknowledged outstanding papers which almost met the criteria but are very important research and wanted to draw attention to them. The outstanding papers include ‘Transferability for Graph Convolutional Networks’, and ‘SE(3)-Hyena Operator for Scalable Equivariant Learning’.

The five excellent works are featured as contributed talks at the workshop, as follows:

  • Berfin Inal: ‘Adaptive Sampling for Continuous Group Equivariant Neural Networks’ (Runner up);\
  • Mohamed Amine Ketata: ‘Lift Your Molecules: Molecular Graph Generation in Latent Euclidean Space’(Runner up);
  • Jacob Bamberger: ‘Bundle Neural Networks for message diffusion on graphs’ (Runner up);
  • Yoav Gelberg: ‘Variational Inference Failures Under Model Symmetries: Permutation Invariant Posteriors for Bayesian Neural Networks’ (Best paper);
  • Meng Song: ‘Probabilistic World Modeling with Asymmetric Distance Measure’ (Best paper in extended abstract category).

The full papers is published in the Proceedings of the Machine Learning Research (PMLR) under GRaM workshop proceedings and it includes a long preface for the workshop, such as details such as workshop motivation, program schedule as well as program committee, and plans regarding GRaM workshop in the future.

The workshop awarded the ELLIS Mobility Grant for GRaM with the support of ELLIS unit Amsterdam, ELLIS unit Linz, and the ELISE Project. It was successfully organised by the Sharvaree Vadgama, Erik Bekkers, Alison Pouplin, Robin Walters, Hannah Lawrence, Sékou-Oumar Kaba, Jakub Tomczak, Tegan Emerson, Henry Kvinge, and Stefanie Jegelka.

For more information, you can visit https://gram-workshop.github.io/.

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