Research Seminar "Machine Learning Theory"

This is the research seminar by Ulrike's group.

When and where

Each thursday 14:00 - 15:00, Seminar room 2rd floor, MvL6.

What

Most sessions take place in form of a reading group: everybody reads the assigned paper before the meeting. Then we jointly discuss the paper in the meeting. Sometimes we also have talks by guests or members of the group.

Who

PhD students and researchers of the University of Tübingen. We do not mind people dropping in and out depending on whether they find the current session interesting or not.

Upcoming meetings

  • 8.5.2025 ulrike: I would like to read up on e-values. As starting point I suggest this paper: Grünwald: Beyond Neyman–Pearson: E-values enable hypothesis testing with a data-driven alpha. PNAS, 2024. We only discuss the first couple of pages... pdf.
  • 22.5. Presentation by Ulrike on the counterexample project
  • 29.5.2025 Likely no reading group
  • 5.6.2025 We should read up on mechanistic interpretability. Suggestions? I vaguely remember somebody mentioning a good paper. Here is one recent iclr paper: link
  • 12.6.2025 Paper discussion: InstaSHAP: Interpretable Additive Models Explain Shapley Values Instantly. ICLR 2025 link
  • 17.6.2025 (TUESDAY 14:00, room tba): MSc defense Clara Grotehans
  • 26.6.2025 Paper discussion: Training on the Test Task Confounds Evaluation and Emergence. ICLR 2025

Past meetings

Listed here.

Suggested papers for future meetings

Feel free to make suggestions!
If you do, please (i) try to select short conference papers rather than 40-page-journal papers; (ii) please put your name when entering suggestions; it does not mean that you need to present it, but then we can judge where it comes from; (iii) Please provide a link, not just a title.
  • Everything, Everywhere, All at Once: Is Mechanistic Interpretability Identifiable?, ICLR 2025, link (Gunnar)
  • Circuit Tracing: Revealing Computational Graphs in Language Models, link (Gunnar)
  • How to Probe: Simple Yet Effective Techniques for Improving Post-Hoc Explanations, ICLR 2025, link (Gunnar)
  • Unifying Feature-Based Explanations with Functional ANOVA and Cooperative GAme Theory, AISTATS 2025, link (Gunnar)
  • Paper discussion (who?) Chain of Log-Concave Markov Chains, Saeed Saremi, Ji Won Park, Francis Bach, 2024 pdf
  • Trade-off Between Efficiency and Consistency for Removal-based Explanations, Neurips 2023 link (Ulrike)
  • Robust Explanation for Free or At the Cost of Faithfulness. ICML 2023. link (Ulrike)
  • Locally Invariant Explanations: Towards Stable and Unidirectional Explanations through Local Invariant Learning link (Ulrike)
  • link