Call for Papers

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1st International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR2013)
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Website: https://sites.google.com/site/representationlearning2013/

Held in conjunction with AISTATS2013, Scottsdale, Arizona, May 2nd-4th 2013

Submission deadline (for initial arXiv submission): January 15th 2013


Overview
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It is well understood that the performance of machine learning methods is heavily dependent on the choice of data representation (or features) on which they are applied. The rapidly developing field of representation learning is concerned with questions surrounding how we can best learn meaningful and useful representations of data.  We take a broad view of the field, and include in it topics such as deep learning and feature learning, metric learning, kernel learning, compositional models, non-linear structured prediction, and issues regarding non-convex optimization.

Despite the importance of representation learning to machine learning and to application areas such as vision, speech, audio and NLP, there is currently no common venue for researchers who share a common interest in this topic. The goal of ICLR is to help fill this void.

A non-exhaustive list of relevant topics:
- unsupervised representation learning
- supervised representation learning
- metric learning and kernel learning
- dimensionality expansion, sparse modeling
- hierarchical models
- optimization for representation learning
- implementation issues, parallelization, software platforms, hardware
- applications in vision, audio, speech, and natural language processing, robotics and neuroscience.
- other applications


ICLR2013's Two Submission Tracks:
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ICLR2013 has two publication tracks:


Conference Track: These papers are reviewed as standard conference papers. Papers should be between 6-9 pages in length. Accepted papers will be presented at the main conference as either an oral or poster presentation and will be included in the official ICLR2013 proceedings. 

A subset of accepted conference track papers will be selected to participate in a JMLR special topics issue on the subject of Representation Learning. Authors of the selected papers will be given an opportunity to extend their original submissions with supplementary material.


Workshop Track: Papers submitted to this track are ideally 2-3 pages long and describe late-breaking developments. This track is meant to carry on the tradition of the former Snowbird Learning Workshop. These papers are considered as workshop papers (and can be published elsewhere). They will be lightly reviewed by ICLR reviewers.


ICLR2013 Submission Instructions:
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(1) Authors should post their submissions (both conference and workshop tracks) on arXiv: http://arxiv.org

(2) Once the arXiv paper is publicly visible (there can be an approx. 30 hour delay), authors should go to the openreview ICLR2013 website: http://openreview.net/iclr2013 to submit to either the conference track or the workshop track.
To register on the openreview ICLR2013 website, the submitting author requires a google account.

Both tracks will use the NIPS format (style files available here: http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/StyleFiles). 

Submission deadline (for initial arXiv submission): January 15th 2013

Notes:

i. Regarding the conference submission's 6-9 page limits, these are really meant as guidelines and will not be strictly enforced. For example, figures should not be shrunk to illegible size to fit within the page limit. However, in order to ensure a reasonable workload for our reviewers, papers that go beyond the 9 pages should be formatted to include a 9 page submission and a separate supplementary material submission that will be optionally reviewed. If the paper is selected for the JMLR special topic issue, this supplementary material can be incorporated into the final journal version.

ii. Workshop track submissions should be formatted as a short paper, with introduction, problem statement, brief explanation of solution, figure(s) and references. They should not merely be abstracts.

iii. Paper revisions will be permitted in response to reviewer comments (see "A New Reviewing Paradigm" section below).

A New Reviewing Paradigm:
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ICLR2013 will use a novel publication model that will proceed as follows:

- After the authors have posted their submissions on arXiv, the ICLR program committee designates anonymous reviewers as usual.

- The submitted reviews are published without the name of the reviewer, but with an indication that they are the designated reviews. Anyone can write and publish comments on the paper (non anonymously). Anyone can ask the program chairs for permission to become an anonymous designated reviewer (open bidding). The program chairs have ultimate control over the publication of each anonymous review. Open commenters will have to use their real name, linked with their Google Scholar profile.

- Authors can post comments in response to reviews and comments. They can revise the paper as many times as they want, possibly citing some of the reviews.

- By March 15th 2013, the ICLR program committee will consider all submitted papers, comments, and reviews and will decide which papers are to be presented at the conference as oral or poster. Although papers can be modified after that date, there is no guarantee that the modifications will be taken into account by the committee.

- Papers that are not accepted for publication in the proceedings will be considered non-archival, and could be submitted elsewhere (modified or not), although the ICLR site will maintain the reviews, the comments, and the links to the arXiv versions.


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Invited Speakers
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Jeff Bilmes (U. Washington)
Jason Eisner (JHU)
Geoffrey Hinton (U. Toronto)
Ruslan Salakhutdinov (U. Toronto)
Max Welling (U.Amsterdam)
Alan Yuille (UCLA)


General Chairs
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Yoshua Bengio, Université de Montreal
Yann LeCun, New York University

Program Chairs
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Aaron Courville, Université de Montreal
Rob Fergus, New York University
Chris Manning, Stanford University

Contact
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The organizers can be contacted at: iclr2013.programchairs@gmail.com