Alex Guerra will present his General Exam "Neuro-Symbolic Function Representations" on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 9:00 AM in CS 402 and via zoom. Zoom link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/9379621328 Committee Members: Ryan Adams (advisor), Jia Deng, Tom Griffiths Abstract: Science is driven by the quest to find patterns in the universe. Patterns can be expressed as functions, with inputs that give rise to some output. In machine learning, we typically aim to find useful representations of data. However, because the universe is most naturally described by the functions giving rise to this data, we argue that being able to represent functions themselves is a more general, and hence powerful capability. By creating representations of functions themselves, we can learn operators on top of these functions that give us a powerful set of tools to solve problems in new ways. In this work, we introduce a novel method of representing functions, along with a way of learning operators on top of these representations such as composition, differentiation, and integration. We demonstrate how these tools can help us solve a wide array of scientific problems in new ways. The results shown here are merely a small sample of the capabilities of these representations can afford us, and we hope that this work serves to inspire the reader to think about their own problems from a new perspective. At its core, this method is a highly general way of modelling interaction, and we hope that it inspires a new way of thinking about representing symbolic structures. Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Y67d2G0fRF-jxLLYB3pop0LQV9V285LE-ErNl6BF... Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so. Louis Riehl Graduate Administrator Computer Science Department, CS213 Princeton University (609) 258-8014