ML Training Strategies Inspired by Humans’ Learning Skills

Pengtao Xie, Assistant Professor, UC San Diego

Abstract: Humans, as the most powerful learners on the planet, have accumulated a lot of learning skills, such as learning through tests, interleaving learning, self-explanation, active recalling, to name a few. These learning skills and methodologies enable humans to learn new topics more effectively and efficiently. We are interested in investigating whether humans’ learning skills can be borrowed to help machines to learn better. Specifically, we aim to formalize these skills and leverage them to train better machine learning (ML) models. To achieve this goal, we develop a general framework, Skillearn, which provides a principled way to represent humans’ learning skills mathematically and use the formally-represented skills to improve the training of ML models. In two case studies, we apply Skillearn to formalize two learning skills of humans: learning by passing tests and interleaving learning, and use the formalized skills to improve neural architecture search.

Pengtao Xie is an assistant professor at UC San Diego. He received his PhD from the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University in 2018. His research interests lie in machine learning inspired by human learning and its applications in healthcare. His research outcomes have been adopted by medical device companies, medical imaging centers, hospitals, etc. and have been published at top-tier artificial intelligence conferences and journals including ICML, NeurIPS, ACL, ICCV, TACL, etc. He is the recipient of the Tencent AI-Lab Faculty Award, Tencent WeChat Faculty Award, the Innovator Award presented by the Pittsburgh Business Times, the Siebel Scholars award, and the Goldman Sachs Global Leader Scholarship.