I am a professor of Computer Engineering at Koç University in Istanbul and the founding director of the KUIS AI Center. Previously I was at the MIT AI Lab and later co-founded Inquira, Inc. My research is in natural language processing and machine learning. For prospective students here are some research topics, papers, classes, blog posts and past students.
Koç Üniversitesi Bilgisayar Mühendisliği Bölümü'nde öğretim üyesiyim ve KUIS AI Merkezi'nin kurucu müdürüyüm. Bundan önce MIT Yapay Zeka Laboratuarı'nda çalıştım ve Inquira, Inc. şirketini kurdum. Araştırma konularım doğal dil işleme ve yapay öğrenmedir. İlgilenen öğrenciler için araştırma konuları, makaleler, verdiğim dersler, Türkçe yazılarım, ve mezunlarımız.

September 20, 2022

Teke Tek Bilim Programı

Habertürk TV Teke Tek Bilim Programında Fatih Altaylı, Boğaziçi'nden Cem Say ve ODTÜ'den Şeyda Ertekin ile yapay zeka konuştuk. Tüm program için link: https://youtu.be/1R2XHcOXq9o.
Full post...

September 19, 2022

Self-Supervised Learning with an Information Maximization Criterion

Serdar Ozsoy, Shadi Hamdan, Sercan Ö. Arik, Deniz Yuret, Alper T. Erdogan. To appear in NeurIPS, Nov 2022. (PDF, arXiv:2209.07999, Poster)

Abstract: Self-supervised learning allows AI systems to learn effective representations from large amounts of data using tasks that do not require costly labeling. Mode collapse, i.e., the model producing identical representations for all inputs, is a central problem to many self-supervised learning approaches, making self-supervised tasks, such as matching distorted variants of the inputs, ineffective. In this article, we argue that a straightforward application of information maximization among alternative latent representations of the same input naturally solves the collapse problem and achieves competitive empirical results. We propose a self-supervised learning method, CorInfoMax, that uses a second-order statistics-based mutual information measure that reflects the level of correlation among its arguments. Maximizing this correlative information measure between alternative representations of the same input serves two purposes: (1) it avoids the collapse problem by generating feature vectors with non-degenerate covariances; (2) it establishes relevance among alternative representations by increasing the linear dependence among them. An approximation of the proposed information maximization objective simplifies to a Euclidean distance-based objective function regularized by the log-determinant of the feature covariance matrix. The regularization term acts as a natural barrier against feature space degeneracy. Consequently, beyond avoiding complete output collapse to a single point, the proposed approach also prevents dimensional collapse by encouraging the spread of information across the whole feature space. Numerical experiments demonstrate that CorInfoMax achieves better or competitive performance results relative to the state-of-the-art SSL approaches.


Full post...

September 09, 2022

Müge Kural, M.S. 2022


Current position: PhD Student, Koç University (LinkedIn, Email)
MS Thesis: Unsupervised learning of morphology. September 2022. (PDF, Presentation)

Thesis Abstract:

Unsupervised learning of morphological rules is one of the expected abilities of natural language processing (NLP) models since children learn these rules during their native language acquisition without supervision. Based on this expectation, we present a comprehensive experimental setup for evaluating the morphological learning of several unsupervised models such as Autoencoders (AE), Variational Autoencoders (VAE), Character-level Language Models (CharLM) and Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQVAE) at the following tasks: probing for morphological features, morphological segmentation and morphological reinflection. In our study, we show that for probing, all models outperform baselines with an indication of encoding morphological knowledge; for morphological segmentation, VAE and CharLMs have comparable performances to unsupervised SOTA models; for morphological reinflection, VQVAE with multiple codebooks has the ability to identify the lemma and suffixes of a word and turns out to be a good candidate to perform inflectional tasks.


Full post...

August 30, 2022

KUIS AI success in the 1st Shared Task on Multilingual Clause-Level Morphology

Congratulations to the KUIS AI Team for their success in MRL 2022: Emre Can Açıkgöz, Müge Kural, Tilek Chubakov, Gözde Gül Şahin, Deniz Yuret.

Full post...

August 12, 2022

Serdar Özsoy, M.S. 2022


Current position: Senior Specialist - Data Science in Arçelik Global (LinkedIn)
MS Thesis: Self-Supervised Learning with an Information Maximization Criterion. August 2022. (PDF, Presentation)

Thesis Abstract:

Self-supervised learning provides a solution to learn effective representations from large amounts of data without performing data labeling, which is often expensive in terms of time, effort, and cost.The main problem with the self-supervised learning approach, in general, is collapse, i.e., obtaining identical representations for all inputs while matching different representations generated from the same input. In this thesis, we argue that information maximization among latent representations of different versions of the same input naturally prevents collapse. To this end, we propose a novel self-supervised learning method, CorInfoMax, based on maximizing the second-order statistics-based measure of mutual information that reflects the degree of correlation between the latent representation arguments. Maximizing this correlative information measure between alternative latent representations of the same input serves two main purposes: (1) it avoids the collapse problem by generating feature vectors with non-degenerate covariances; (2) it increases the linear dependence between alternative representations, ensuring that they are related to each other. The proposed information maximization objective is simplified to an objective function based on Euclidean distance regularized by the log-determinant of the feature covariance matrix. Due to the regularization term acting as a natural barrier against feature space degeneracy, CorInfoMax also prevents dimensional collapse by enforcing representations to span across the entire feature space. Empirical experiments show that CorInfoMax achieves better or competitive performance results over state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods across different tasks and datasets.


Full post...