The AutoML Podcast

AutoML is dead an LLMs have killed it? MLGym is a benchmark and framework testing this theory. Roberta Raileanu and Deepak Nathani discuss how well current LLMs are doing at solving ML tasks, what the biggest roadblocks are, and what that means for AutoML generally.

Check out the paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.14499

More on Roberta: https://rraileanu.github.io/

More on Deepak: https://dnathani.net/

Where and how can we use foundation models in AutoML? Richard Song, researcher at Google DeepMind, has some answers. Starting off from his position paper on leveraging foundation models for optimization, we chat about what makes foundation models valuable for AutoML, how the next steps could look like, but also why the community is not currently embracing the topic as much as it could.

Paper Link: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.03547

Richard's website: https://xingyousong.github.io/

Oscar Beijbom is talking about what it's like to run an AutoML startup: Nyckel. Beyond that, we chat about the differences between academia and industry, what truly matters in application and more.

Check out Nyckel at: https://www.nyckel.com/

Colin White, head of research at Abacus AI, takes us on a tour of Neural Architecture Search: its origins, important paradigms and the future of NAS in the age of LLMs. If you're looking for a broad overview of NAS, this is the podcast for you!

There are so many great foundation models in many different domains - but how do you choose one for your specific problem? And how can you best finetune it? Sebastian Pineda has an answer: Quicktune can help select the best model and tune it for specific use cases. Listen to find out when this will be a Huggingface feature and if hyperparameter optimization is even important in finetuning models (spoiler: very much so)!

Designing algorithms by hand is hard, so Chris Lu and Matthew Jackson talk about how to meta-learn them for reinforcement learning.  Many of the concepts in this episode are interesting to meta-learning approaches as a whole, though: "how expressive can we be and still perform well?", "how can we get the necessary data to generalize?" and "how do we make the resulting algorithm easy to apply in practice?" are problems that come up for any learning-based approach to AutoML and some of the topics we dive into.

AutoML can be a tool for good, but there are pitfalls along the way. Rahul Sharma and David Selby tell us about how AutoML systems can be used to give us false impressions about explainability metrics of ML systems - maliciously, but also on accident. While this episode isn't talking about a new exciting AutoML method, it can tell us a lot about what can go wrong in applying AutoML and what we should think about when we build tools for ML novices to use.

In today's episode, we're introducing the very special Theresa Eimer to the show.

Theresa will be taking over the hosting of many of the future episodes. Theresa has already recorded multiple episodes and we are stoked to air those shortly.

We also spend a few moments explaining my relative absence in the last few months (since the war in the middle east erupted) and what I'm up to now.

Theresa, we are all so excited to be doing this together!

To learn more about Theresa,
Follow her on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/The_Eimer
Connect with her on LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theresa-eimer-a724b5b0/

As you'll hear in the episode, she's also one of the co-organizers of COSEAL, which you can learn more about here: https://www.coseal.net/

Today we're talking with Nick Erickson from AutoGluon.

We discuss AutoGluon's fascinating origin story, its unique point of view, the science and engineering behind some of its unique contributions, Amazon's Machine Learning University, AutoGluon's multi-layer stack ensembler in all its detail, their feature preprocessing pipeline, their feature type inference, their adaptive approach to early stopping, controlling for inference speeds, the different multi-modal architectures, the ML culture at Amazon, the unique challenges of time series, the role of competitions, the decision to reject hyperparameter optimization, benchmarking in AutoML, what the research community can do to help industry along, AutoGluon's relationship with pre-trained tabular models like Tab-PFN, whether the rise of LLMs is likely to affect AutoGluon, what's stopping more people from adopting AutoML solutions, AutoGluon Cloud, the dream and reality of an auto-benchmarking tool, how to contribute to their project, and many, many other topics.

This was one of my favorite episodes. Nick, thank you for joining!

You can follow Nick on Twitter here: @innixma.
And you can follow AutoGluon on GitHub here: https://github.com/autogluon.

Some more resources on AutoGluon:

• The original AutoGluon Paper: "AutoGluon-Tabular: Robust and Accurate AutoML for Structured Data": https://arxiv.org/abs/2003.06505
• AutoML Fall School 2022 AutoGluon presentation, a good way to understand the philosophy behind AutoGluon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAAITEds-28
• AutoGluon multi-modal paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3534678.3542616

Today we're talking with Joseph Giovanelli about his work on integrating logic and argumentation into AutoML systems.

Joseph is a PhD student at the University of Bologna. He was more recently in Hannover working on ethics and fairness with Marius’ team.

The paper he published presents his framework, HAMLET, which stands for Human-centric AutoML via Logic and Argumentation. It allows a user to iteratively specify constraints in a formal manner and, once defined, those constraints become logical premises. Those premises, when combined together, can produce conflicts with one another, thereby reducing the search space and providing deeper intuition back to the user.

To learn more about HAMLET, see the paper here: https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3135/dataplat_short2.pdf and the repo here: https://github.com/QueueInc/HAMLET

To follow Joseph on LinkedIn, see his profile here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-giovanelli/