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Esther Rolf

12 accepted papers

2026

Mapping on a Budget: Optimizing Spatial Data Collection for ML

AAAI 2026technical

In applications across agriculture, ecology, and human development, machine learning with satellite imagery (SatML) is limited by the sparsity of labeled training data. While satellite data cover the globe, labeled training datasets for SatML are often small, spatially clustered, and collected for o

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

SatCLIP: Global, General-Purpose Location Embeddings with Satellite Imagery

AAAI 2025technical

Geographic information is essential for modeling tasks in fields ranging from ecology to epidemiology. However, extracting relevant location characteristics for a given task can be challenging, often requiring expensive data fusion or distillation from massive global imagery datasets. To address thi…

2024

Geographic Location Encoding with Spherical Harmonics and Sinusoidal Representation Networks

ICLR 2024spotlight

Learning representations of geographical space is vital for any machine learning model that integrates geolocated data, spanning application domains such as remote sensing, ecology, or epidemiology. Recent work embeds coordinates using sine and cosine projections based on Double Fourier Sphere (DFS)…

2024

Position: Application-Driven Innovation in Machine Learning

ICML 2024poster

In this position paper, we argue that application-driven research has been systemically under-valued in the machine learning community. As applications of machine learning proliferate, innovative algorithms inspired by specific real-world challenges have become increasingly important. Such work offe…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2024

Position: Mission Critical – Satellite Data is a Distinct Modality in Machine Learning

ICML 2024spotlight

Satellite data has the potential to inspire a seismic shift for machine learning---one in which we rethink existing practices designed for traditional data modalities. As machine learning for satellite data (SatML) gains traction for its real-world impact, our field is at a crossroads. We can either…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

Fairness and Representation in Satellite-Based Poverty Maps: Evidence of Urban-Rural Disparities and Their Impacts on Downstream Policy

IJCAI 2023poster

Poverty maps derived from satellite imagery are increasingly used to inform high-stakes policy decisions, such as the allocation of humanitarian aid and the distribution of government resources. Such poverty maps are typically constructed by training machine learning algorithms on a relatively modes…

Cited by 13SourcePDFScholar
2022

Resolving label uncertainty with implicit posterior models

UAI 2022poster

We propose a method for jointly inferring labels across a collection of data samples, where each sample consists of an observation and a prior belief about the label. By implicitly assuming the existence of a generative model for which a differentiable predictor is the posterior, we derive a trainin…

2021

Representation Matters: Assessing the Importance of Subgroup Allocations in Training Data

ICML 2021spotlight

Collecting more diverse and representative training data is often touted as a remedy for the disparate performance of machine learning predictors across subpopulations. However, a precise framework for understanding how dataset properties like diversity affect learning outcomes is largely lacking. B…

2020

Balancing Competing Objectives with Noisy Data: Score-Based Classifiers for Welfare-Aware Machine Learning

ICML 2020poster

While real-world decisions involve many competing objectives, algorithmic decisions are often evaluated with a single objective function. In this paper, we study algorithmic policies which explicitly trade off between a private objective (such as profit) and a public objective (such as social welfar…

2020

Post-Estimation Smoothing: A Simple Baseline for Learning with Side Information

AISTATS 2020poster

Observational data are often accompanied by natural structural indices, such as time stamps or geographic locations, which are meaningful to prediction tasks but are often discarded. We leverage semantically meaningful indexing data while ensuring robustness to potentially uninformative or misleadin…

2018

Delayed Impact of Fair Machine Learning

ICML 2018oral

Fairness in machine learning has predominantly been studied in static classification settings without concern for how decisions change the underlying population over time. Conventional wisdom suggests that fairness criteria promote the long-term well-being of those groups they aim to protect. We stu…