PhD student Rwiddhi Chakraborty at UiT
Image:
Robert Jenssen

PhD student Rwiddhi Chakraborty at UiT

Joint Doctoral Course between UiO and UiT

Self Supervised Explainability on Graphs

Joint Doctoral Course between UiO and UiT: Self Supervised Explainability on Graphs

In the past decade, the availability of large-scale datasets allowed the proliferation of deep learning-based architectures in computer vision, language modelling, and graph-based data. The curation and annotation process of these datasets is overly expensive. In recent years, new methodologies emerged to train deep learning models on unlabeled data, so called self-supervision.

Online discussion, Screenshot by Adín Ramírez Rivera

To prepare students on these highly relevant topics, we, University of Oslo (UiO) and UiT The Arctic University of Norway (UiT), as part of the SFI Visual Intelligence efforts, joined forces to teach a special curriculum course about bleeding edge topics related to deep learning methods based on self-supervision and non-structured data (that is, based on graphs). Moreover, due to the need to reveal the decisions made by these models, we placed special emphasis on novel techniques used to explain the inner workings of these models.

The course puts an emphasis on letting the student discuss and lead the learning endeavor. The sessions encompassed active discussions among the participants. Professors from UiO and UiT provided useful moderation and insights to the discussions. William Ho, a UiO masters’ student, mentioned, “this [course] has been the most enjoyable course I’ve ever taken [at] IFI,” due to its highly interactive setup. Also, Rwiddhi Chakraborty, from UiT, expressed the usefulness of the curriculum and discussions. Another anonymous student mentions, “[presenting papers to each other] has been fantastic to complete the learning cycle—since we are learning the content and then presenting/teaching it as well.”

The wonderful experience has already led to innovative ideas on improving collaboration between the two sites and will be integrated into future offerings of the course. After seeing the success and enthusiasm from the students, we will explore new ways of providing more joint venues for the students to collaborate between the two sites.

Responsible at UiT: Michael Kampffmeyer

Responsable at UiO: Adín Ramírez Rivera

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