Seven papers authored by Computer Science researchers from Warwick have been accepted for publication at the 41st International Conference on Machine Learning, one of the top three global venues for machine learning research, which will be held on 21-27 July 2024 in Vienna, Austria:

• Agent-Specific Effects: A Causal Effect Propagation Analysis in Multi-Agent MDPs, by Stelios Triantafyllou, Aleksa Sukovic, Debmalya Mandal, and Goran Radanovic
• Dynamic Facility Location in High Dimensional Euclidean Spaces, by Sayan Bhattacharya, Gramoz Goranci, Shaofeng Jiang, Yi Qian, and Yubo Zhang
• High-Dimensional Kernel Methods under Covariate Shift: Data-Dependent Implicit Regularization, by Yihang Chen, Fanghui Liu, Taiji Suzuki, and Volkan Cevher
• Revisiting character-level adversarial attacks, by Elias Abad Rocamora, Yongtao Wu, Fanghui Liu, Grigorios Chrysos, and Volkan Cevher
• Reward Model Learning vs. Direct Policy Optimization: A Comparative Analysis of Learning from Human Preferences, by Andi Nika, Debmalya Mandal, Parameswaran Kamalaruban, Georgios Tzannetos, Goran Radanovic, and Adish Singla
• To Each (Textual Sequence) Its Own: Improving Memorized-Data Unlearning in Large Language Models, by George-Octavian Bărbulescu and Peter Triantafillou
• Towards Neural Architecture Search through Hierarchical Generative Modeling, by Lichuan Xiang, Łukasz Dudziak, Mohamed Abdelfattah, Abhinav Mehrotra, Nicholas Lane, and Hongkai Wen

We are happy to announce four promotions in the department:

• Dr Charilaos Efthymiou has been promoted to Associate Professor
• Dr Igor Carboni Oliveira has been promoted to Associate Professor
• Dr Hongkai Wen has been promoted to Professor
• Dr Weiren Yu has been promoted to Associate Professor

Many congratulations to our colleagues for all their achievements!

On this recent article in the Quanta magazine, Alex Dixon, who wrote in Haskell the first solver for the problem, commented:

For the past 50 years, Vector Addition Systems—a simple but powerful computational model—have been a topic of great interest in theoretical CS. The reachability problem in that model asks whether we can get from some configuration to another.

The problem sounds relatively easy on a first glance, and an exponential lower bound held firm for over 40 years. Work by excellent theoreticians, including familiar names from Warwick DCS, finally closed the difficulty of the problem in 2021, concluding that it is very, very difficult indeed.