Invited Talk 3: Meta-Learning Reliable Priors for Interactive Learning

To navigate the exploration-exploitation trade-off in interactive learning we often rely on the uncertainty estimates of a probabilistic or Bayesian model. A key challenge is to correctly specify the prior of our model so that its epistemic uncertainty estimates are reliable. In this talk, we explore how we can harness related datasets or previous experience to meta-learn priors in a data-driven way. We study this problem through the lens of PAC-Bayesian theory and derive practical and scalable meta-learning algorithms. In particular, we discuss how to make sure that the meta-learned priors yield confidence intervals that are not overconfident so that our interactive learners explore sufficiently. Overall, the proposed meta-learning framework allows us significantly speed up interactive learning through transfer from previous tasks/runs.