Luke Vilnis

College of Information and Computer Sciences
University of Massachusetts Amherst

140 Governors Drive
University of Massachusetts
Amherst, MA 01003

luke@cs.umass.edu

GitHub | LinkedIn | Google Scholar | CV

I am a PhD candidate working in the Information Extraction and Synthesis Lab with Professor Andrew McCallum. I started in Fall 2012. Previously I was a software engineer and consultant at Mavenomics, Inc., developing business intelligence software for the financial sector, working on compilers, query engines, financial math and data visualization. I graduated from Duke University in 2010 with a B.S. in Mathematics and Economics. I received my M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2015. I interned with Paul Mineiro and Nikos Karampatziakis in the Microsoft Cloud Information Services Laboratory in the summer of 2014. I interned with Andrew Dai on the Google Brain team in the summer of 2015. I am interning with George Dahl on the Google Brain team in the summer of 2016.

I am broadly interested in machine learning, natural language processing and knowledge base construction. Areas of interest include common sense knowledge, representation learning, structured prediction, coreference, and optimization. I am also an armchair PLT and functional programming enthusiast, and chief maintainer of the factorie machine learning toolkit.

Publications

• Generating Sentences from a Continuous Space.  Samuel Bowman^*, Luke Vilnis^*, Oriol Vinyals, Andrew Dai, Rafal Jozefowicz, Samy Bengio.  Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), 2016.   ^* Equal contribution. Oral presentation.
  

• Adding Gradient Noise Improves Learning for Very Deep Networks.  Arvind Neelakantan^*, Luke Vilnis^*, Quoc V. Le, Ilya Sutskever, Lukasz Kaiser, Karol Kurach, James Martens.  International Conference on Learning Representations Workshop (ICLR WS), 2016.   ^* Equal contribution.
  

• Bethe Projections for Non-Local Inference.  Luke Vilnis^*, David Belanger^*, Daniel Sheldon, Andrew McCallum.  Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI), 2015.   ^* Equal contribution.
  

• Learning Dynamic Feature Selection for Fast Sequential Prediction.  Emma Strubell, Luke Vilnis, Kate Silverstein, Andrew McCallum.  Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL), 2015. Oral presentation. Outstanding paper award.
  

• Word Representations via Gaussian Embedding.  Luke Vilnis, Andrew McCallum.  International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2015. Oral presentation.
  

• Generalized Eigenvectors for Large Multiclass Problems.  Luke Vilnis, Nikos Karampatziakis, Paul Mineiro.  Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on Representation and Learning Methods for Complex Outputs (NIPS WS), 2014. Oral presentation.
  

• Training for Fast Sequential Prediction Using Dynamic Feature Selection.  Emma Strubell, Luke Vilnis, Andrew McCallum.  Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on Modern Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing (NIPS WS), 2014.
  

• Optimization and Learning in Factorie.  Alexandre Passos, Luke Vilnis, Andrew McCallum.  Neural Information Processing Systems Workshop on Optimization for Machine Learning (NIPS WS), 2013.
  

• Dynamic Knowledge Base Alignment for Coreference Resolution.  Jiaping Zheng, Luke Vilnis, Sameer Singh, Jinho Choi, Andrew McCallum.  Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL), 2013.
  

Tutorials/Notes

These are some notes and tutorials I've worked on for class projects and for fun.

• Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Mixing, and the Spectral Gap.  Luke Vilnis, 5/12/2013.