KDD-21 Tutorial

AutoML: A Perspective where Industry Meets Academy

Date & Time: 13:00 pm - 16:00 pm, August 14, 2021

Location: Singapore

Machine learning methods have been adopted for various real-world applications, ranging from social networks, online image/video-sharing platforms, and e-commerce to education, healthcare, etc. However, several components of machine learning methods, including data representation, hyperparameter and model architecture, can largely affect their performance in practice. Moreover, the explosions of data scale and model size make the optimization of these components more and more time-consuming for machine learning developers. To tackle these challenges, Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) aims to automate the process of applying machine learning methods to solve real-world application tasks, reducing the time of tuning machine learning methods while maintaining good performance. In this tutorial, we will introduce the main research topics of AutoML, including Hyperparameter Optimization, Neural Architecture Search and Meta-Learning. Two emerging topics of AutoML, DNN-based Feature Generation and Machine Learning Guided Database, will also be discussed as they are important components for real-world applications. For each topic, we will motivate it with examples from industry, illustrate the state-of-the-art methods, and discuss their pros and cons from both perspectives of industry and academy. We will also discuss some future research directions based on our experience from industry and the trends in academy.

Tutorial Slides
slides.pdf

Date: August 14, 2021
Location: Singapore
13:00PM--13:10PM Welcome from Organizers
13:10PM--13:40PM Hyperparameter Optimization (HPO)
13:40PM--14:10PM Neural Architecture Search (NAS)
14:10PM--14:30PM Meta-learning
14:30PM--15:00PM Auto Feature Generation
15:00PM--15:25PM End-to-End AutoML
15:25PM--15:50PM ML-Guided Database
15:50PM--15:55PM AutoML Tools
15:55PM--16:00PM Closing Remarks

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Yaliang Li

Research Scientist
Alibaba Group

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Zhen Wang

Research Scientist
Alibaba Group

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Yuexiang Xie

Research Scientist
Alibaba Group

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Bolin Ding

Research Scientist
Alibaba Group

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Ce Zhang

Assistant Professor
ETH Zurich