Ben Rubinstein
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bipr.bsky.social
Ben Rubinstein
@bipr.bsky.social
1.5K followers 330 following 16 posts
ML & Privacy Prof at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Deputy Dean Research. Prev Microsoft Research, Berkeley EECS PhD. @bipr on the X bird site. He/him.
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Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Curious to see how they plan to anonymise our NHS data for training ML models. I personally wouldn’t know how to start doing that

www.theguardian.com/politics/202...
The NACC (Australia's Commonwealth attempt at an anti-corruption commission) has been quite the disappointment.
The NACC:
$140m spent, 200 staff, 0 results.
No wonder Labor and Coalition colluded to ensure the NACC wouldn’t have public hearings. Farcical.
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Excited to co-organise another summer school on learning theory! This time in beautiful Odense, Denmark. Please share and apply here:
event.sdu.dk/algoml2025
PhD School on Intersections of Algorithms and Machine Learning Theory
event.sdu.dk
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
I seem to be on a "defend LLMs for personal use" kick. It seemed like fun to see how I've used them in the past month. In most cases, I first did a search that proved useless (often, spending a long time following links that looked like they *could* be helpful…but weren't). ↵
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
I've been thinking about in-context learning for nearly 3 years. While there is still plenty I don't fully understand, five papers have--to a very large extent--shaped my perspective on it, and I believe everyone should read them.
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
As the year winds down, the summer sun shines and boxing day does its thing 🏏, reminder that if you want to follow #ComputerScience academics in Australia 🇦🇺 and NZ 🇳🇿, there's a starter pack perfect for you: go.bsky.app/N5x6GLQ
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Loving the new Yayoi Kusama exhibition @ National Gallery Victoria #Melbourne
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Announcing the accepted papers for ALT 2025! It was a very competitive year, and we were able to accept only 51 of 144 submissions. Thanks to my co-chair Po-Ling Loh and the entire program committee for their hard work!

See you in Milan in February!

algorithmiclearningtheory.org/alt2025/acce...
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh is hiring a lecturer or reader in embodied natural language processing. Apply by 31 Jan 2025 at edin.ac/4fqgawg
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Needless to say, we disagree with that headline. It turns out to be an opinion piece we wrote for them a few months ago and they just published — with a bunch of changes they didn’t tell us about. wired.com/story/human-...
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
I was on NPR with
@bobbyallyn.bsky.social re Australia’s teen social media ban.

Tests by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology found that age algorithms are off by an average of 5yrs for West Africans–discriminating in practice.

🎧 Take a listen! www.npr.org/2024/12/09/n...
How will Australia's teen social media actually work?
Australia's Parliament has passed one of the strictest social media crackdowns in the world. Under the new law, anyone under 16 years old will be banned from opening a social media account.
www.npr.org
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Found slides by Ankur Moitra (presented at a TCS For All event) on "How to do theoretical research." Full of great advice!

My favourite: "Find the easiest problem you can't solve. The more embarrassing, the better!"

Slides: drive.google.com/file/d/15VaT...
TCS For all: sigact.org/tcsforall/
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
I look forward to co-directing the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) Research Program at CIFAR with @catherineregis.bsky.social

We will be designing the program in the coming months and will soon share ways to get involved with this new community.

Read more here: cifar.ca/cifarnews/20...
Congrats! Great program and choice of leadership!
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Now that @mkearnsphilly.bsky.social is here, this starter pack just became the real deal. Better refollow it. go.bsky.app/21nFz12
Reposted by Ben Rubinstein
Actual content post: Have not talked much about this work yet but we have a paper on Oracle-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Max Value Ensembles at this year's #NeurIPS. We provide an efficient algorithm to ensemble policies given a value function oracle. arxiv.org/abs/2405.16739
Oracle-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Max Value Ensembles
Reinforcement learning (RL) in large or infinite state spaces is notoriously challenging, both theoretically (where worst-case sample and computational complexities must scale with state space cardina...
arxiv.org