Han Bao

About me

Research interests

My central focus of research is in theoretical understanding of statistical machine learning, particularly from the following perspectives.

1. Learning theory of loss functions, through which I like to study robustness to adversarial attacks (COLT2020) and class imbalance (AISTATS2020, AISTATS2021).
2. Evaluation metrics of predictions and representations. Recently, I am interested in how it is possible to learn good representations via similarity in light of a downstream task (ICML2018, AISTATS2022, ICML2022).

I am glad to have discussions with those who have common interests! You may have a look at the slides of my past talks such as this to see my tastes.

News

• Dec 21, 2022: Our presentation at IBIS2022 got the presentation award!
• Nov 11, 2022: Our paper “Sparse Regularized Optimal Transport with Deformed q-Entropy” has been out by Entropy. We show a possible formulation of sparse optimal transport via q-exponential distributions in Tsallis statistics.
• Sep 19, 2022: Our paper “Approximating 1-Wasserstein Distance with Trees” has been accepted by Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR). For any ground metric of 1-Wasserstein distance, we proposed an approximation method with a tree metric.
• Sep 17, 2022: Our paper “Robust Computation of Optimal Transport by β-potential Regularization” has been accepted by ACML2022.
• Aug 23, 2022: Our monograph “Machine Learning from Weak Supervision: An Empirical Risk Minimization Approach” has been published from MIT press.
• May 16, 2022: Our paper “On the Surrogate Gap between Contrastive and Supervised Losses” has been accepted by ICML2022. We improve upper and lower bounds for the gap between contrastive and supervised losses and claim that larger negative samples are good for downstream classification. The earlier version is available here.
• May 9, 2022: Our AISTATS2022 paper “Pairwise Supervision Can Provably Elicit a Decision Boundary” has appeared in the proceedings (link).
• Apr 1, 2022: I have joined Kyoto University as an assistant professor. Feel free to visit Kyoto and contact me.
• Mar 24, 2022: I finished my three year PhD in computer science and nine years life in the University of Tokyo. Also, I was fortunate to have an opportunity to be a representative graduate at the diploma presentation ceremony to make an address in the ceremony. My student life has been supported by so many great friends not only in Tokyo but also in other cities in Japan and even in overseas. I would like to appreciate everyone who has been with me!