Today we continue our NeurIPS 2022 series joined by Tony Jebara, VP of engineering and head of machine learning at Spotify. In our conversation with Tony, we discuss his role at Spotify and how the company’s use of machine learning has evolved over the last few years, and the business value of machine learning, specifically recommendations, hold at the company.
We dig into his talk on the intersection of reinforcement learning and lifetime value (LTV) at Spotify, which explores the application of Offline RL for user experience personalization. We discuss the various papers presented in the talk, and how they all map toward determining and increasing a user’s LTV. 
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/609.

Reinforcement Learning for Personalization at Spotify with Tony Jebara - #609

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Today we're joined by Alex Havrilla, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, to discuss "Teaching Large Language Models to Reason with Reinforcement Learning." Alex discusses the role of creativity and exploration in problem solving and explores the opportunities presented by applying reinforcement learning algorithms to the challenge of improving reasoning in large language models. Alex also shares his research on the effect of noise on language model training, highlighting the robustness of LLM architecture. Finally, we delve into the future of RL, and the potential of combining language models with traditional methods to achieve more robust AI reasoning.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/680.

Teaching Large Language Models to Reason with Reinforcement Learning with Alex Havrilla - #680

Today we're joined by Peter Hase, a fifth-year PhD student at the University of North Carolina NLP lab. We discuss "scalable oversight", and the importance of developing a deeper understanding of how large neural networks make decisions. We learn how matrices are probed by interpretability researchers, and explore the two schools of thought regarding how LLMs store knowledge. Finally, we discuss the importance of deleting sensitive information from model weights, and how "easy-to-hard generalization" could increase the risk of releasing open-source foundation models.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/679.

Localizing and Editing Knowledge in LLMs with Peter Hase - #679

Today we're joined by Jonas Geiping, a research group leader at the ELLIS Institute, to explore his paper: "Coercing LLMs to Do and Reveal (Almost) Anything". Jonas explains how neural networks can be exploited, highlighting the risk of deploying LLM agents that interact with the real world. We discuss the role of open models in enabling security research, the challenges of optimizing over certain constraints, and the ongoing difficulties in achieving robustness in neural networks. Finally, we delve into the future of AI security, and the need for a better approach to mitigate the risks posed by optimized adversarial attacks.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/678.

Coercing LLMs to Do and Reveal (Almost) Anything with Jonas Geiping - #678

Today we’re joined by Mido Assran, a research scientist at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR). In this conversation, we discuss V-JEPA, a new model being billed as “the next step in Yann LeCun's vision” for true artificial reasoning. V-JEPA, the video version of Meta’s Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture, aims to bridge the gap between human and machine intelligence by training models to learn abstract concepts in a more efficient predictive manner than generative models. V-JEPA uses a novel self-supervised training approach that allows it to learn from unlabeled video data without being distracted by pixel-level detail. Mido walks us through the process of developing the architecture and explains why it has the potential to revolutionize AI.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/677.

V-JEPA, AI Reasoning from a Non-Generative Architecture with Mido Assran - #677

Today we’re joined by Sherry Yang, senior research scientist at Google DeepMind and a PhD student at UC Berkeley. In this interview, we discuss her new paper, "Video as the New Language for Real-World Decision Making,” which explores how generative video models can play a role similar to language models as a way to solve tasks in the real world. Sherry draws the analogy between natural language as a unified representation of information and text prediction as a common task interface and demonstrates how video as a medium and generative video as a task exhibit similar properties. This formulation enables video generation models to play a variety of real-world roles as planners, agents, compute engines, and environment simulators. Finally, we explore UniSim, an interactive demo of Sherry's work and a preview of her vision for interacting with AI-generated environments.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/676.

Reinforcement Learning for Personalization at Spotify with Tony Jebara - #609

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