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Christian Igel

22 accepted papers

2026

A TEXT-TO-TEXT ALIGNMENT ALGORITHM FOR BETTER EVALUATION OF MODERN SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEMS

ICASSP 2026poster

Modern neural networks have greatly improved performance across speech recognition benchmarks. However, gains are often driven by frequent words with limited semantic weight, which can obscure meaningful differences in word error rate, the primary evaluation metric. Errors in rare terms, named entit…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2026

How Should Transformers Represent Numeric Values in Electronic Health Records?

ICML 2026poster

How do we map numeric values to representations in transformer-based sequence processing, particularly in electronic health record (EHR) data? We systematically compare discrete, continuous, and hybrid value embeddings using synthetic arithmetic tasks embedded within real-world EHR data, as well as …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Position: Neglecting the Sustainability of AI is Fuelling a Global AI Arms Race

ICML 2026poster

Sustainability encompasses three key facets: economic, environmental, and social. However, the nascent discourse that is emerging on sustainable artificial intelligence (AI) has predominantly focused on the environmental sustainability of AI, often neglecting the economic and social aspects. Achievi…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

SuperF: Neural Implicit Fields for Multi-Image Super-Resolution

ICLR 2026poster

High-resolution imagery is often hindered by limitations in sensor technology, atmospheric conditions, and costs. Such challenges occur in satellite remote sensing, but also with handheld cameras, such as our smartphones. Hence, super-resolution aims to enhance the image resolution algorithmically.…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

BMRS: Bayesian Model Reduction for Structured Pruning

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

Modern neural networks are often massively overparameterized leading to high compute costs during training and at inference. One effective method to improve both the compute and energy efficiency of neural networks while maintaining good performance is structured pruning, where full network structur…

2024

EC-NAS: Energy Consumption Aware Tabular Benchmarks for Neural Architecture Search

ICASSP 2024accepted

Energy consumption from the selection, training, and deployment of deep learning models has seen a significant uptick recently. This work aims to facilitate the design of energy-efficient deep learning models that require less computational resources and prioritize environmental sustainability by fo…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Finding NEM-U: Explaining unsupervised representation learning through neural network generated explanation masks

ICML 2024poster

Unsupervised representation learning has become an important ingredient of today's deep learning systems. However, only a few methods exist that explain a learned vector embedding in the sense of providing information about which parts of an input are the most important for its representation. These…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2024

From Coarse to Fine-Grained Open-Set Recognition

CVPR 2024poster

Open-set recognition (OSR) methods aim to identify whether or not a test example belongs to a category ob- served during training. Depending on how visually sim- ilar a test example is to the training categories the OSR task can be easy or extremely challenging. However the vast majority of previous…

2024

MMEarth: Exploring Multi-Modal Pretext Tasks For Geospatial Representation Learning

ECCV 2024poster

"The volume of unlabelled Earth observation (EO) data is huge, but many important applications lack labelled training data. However, EO data offers the unique opportunity to pair data from different modalities and sensors automatically based on geographic location and time, at virtually no human lab…

2022

Information Bottleneck: Exact Analysis of (Quantized) Neural Networks

ICLR 2022poster

The information bottleneck (IB) principle has been suggested as a way to analyze deep neural networks. The learning dynamics are studied by inspecting the mutual information (MI) between the hidden layers and the input and output. Notably, separate fitting and compression phases during training hav…

2021

Chebyshev-Cantelli PAC-Bayes-Bennett Inequality for the Weighted Majority Vote

NeurIPS 2021poster

We present a new second-order oracle bound for the expected risk of a weighted majority vote. The bound is based on a novel parametric form of the Chebyshev-Cantelli inequality (a.k.a. one-sided Chebyshev’s), which is amenable to efficient minimization. The new form resolves the optimization challen…

2021

On Scaling Contrastive Representations for Low-Resource Speech Recognition

ICASSP 2021accepted

Recent advances in self-supervised learning through contrastive training have shown that it is possible to learn a competitive speech recognition system with as little as 10 minutes of labeled data. However, these systems are computationally expensive since they require pre-training followed by fine…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2021

On the convergence of the Metropolis algorithm with fixed-order updates for multivariate binary probability distributions

AISTATS 2021poster

The Metropolis algorithm is arguably the most fundamental Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. But the algorithm is not guaranteed to converge to the desired distribution in the case of multivariate binary distributions (e.g., Ising models or stochastic neural networks such as Boltzmann machines)…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

A Loss Function for Generative Neural Networks Based on Watson’s Perceptual Model

NeurIPS 2020poster

To train Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) to generate realistic imagery requires a loss function that reflects human perception of image similarity. We propose such a loss function based on Watson's perceptual model, which computes a weighted distance in frequency space and accounts for luminance an…

2020

Algorithms for Estimating the Partition Function of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (Extended Abstract)

IJCAI 2020poster

Estimating the normalization constants (partition functions) of energy-based probabilistic models (Markov random fields) with a high accuracy is required for measuring performance, monitoring the training progress of adaptive models, and conducting likelihood ratio tests. We devised a unifying th…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Label-similarity Curriculum Learning

ECCV 2020poster

Curriculum learning can improve neural network training by guiding the optimization to desirable optima. We propose a novel curriculum learning approach for image classification that adapts the loss function by changing the label representation. The idea is to use a probability distribution over cla…

2020

Second Order PAC-Bayesian Bounds for the Weighted Majority Vote

NeurIPS 2020spotlight

We present a novel analysis of the expected risk of weighted majority vote in multiclass classification. The analysis takes correlation of predictions by ensemble members into account and provides a bound that is amenable to efficient minimization, which yields improved weighting for the majority vo…

2019

U-Time: A Fully Convolutional Network for Time Series Segmentation Applied to Sleep Staging

NeurIPS 2019poster

Neural networks are becoming more and more popular for the analysis of physiological time-series. The most successful deep learning systems in this domain combine convolutional and recurrent layers to extract useful features to model temporal relations. Unfortunately, these recurrent models are diff…

2016

CMA-ES with Optimal Covariance Update and Storage Complexity

NeurIPS 2016poster

The covariance matrix adaptation evolution strategy (CMA-ES) is arguably one of the most powerful real-valued derivative-free optimization algorithms, finding many applications in machine learning. The CMA-ES is a Monte Carlo method, sampling from a sequence of multi-variate Gaussian distributions.…

Cited by 49SourcePDFScholar
2015

Computational Complexity of Linear Large Margin Classification With Ramp Loss

AISTATS 2015poster

Minimizing the binary classification error with a linear model leads to an NP-hard problem. In practice, surrogate loss functions are used, in particular loss functions leading to large margin classification such as the hinge loss and the ramp loss. The intuitive large margin concept is theoretical…

Cited by 6SourcePDFScholar