UAI-2022 Competition

[Eugene Freuder]

Rina Dechter asked me to help spread the word on the UAI-2022 competition, which I’m very pleased to do. 

Subject:	Update on the UAI competition 2022
Date:	Fri, 30 Sep 2022 17:22:28 -0700
From:	Rina Dechter <dec...@ics.uci.edu>

Dear members of AI Inference and Machine Learning Communities,

Earlier this year, the UAI conference announced a renewed UAI competition for 2022. See the message below, and https://uaicompetition.github.io/uci-2022/. The purpose of this message is to provide a quick update and to strongly encourage you to participate now. While things developed more slowly than we hoped due to summer activities, we are now ready for an increased pace of participation! Overall we see this competition as an exploration opportunity for everyone in the community who has worked on solvers or on classification learning and in that spirit we would like to encourage participation in each of the categories. Please send your solver to us and we will do the work of evaluating and comparing for you!.

To refresh: in addition to the traditional tasks of evaluating summation and optimization queries over graphical models, this year we introduced a second learning task, a multi-label classification learning challenge.   

Update: in the traditional categories (pr, mar, map, and mmap tasks) we have received several solvers, allowing us to test and update our website, establish evaluation criteria etc.  You can see the current results on the leader board at https://uaicompetition.github.io/uci-2022/. 

The MLC track is now open, ready for your favourite Multi-label Classifier. 

Looking forward for your participation,

UAI-2022 Competition Organizers

Rina Dechter (University of California, Irvine)
Vibhav Gogate (University of Texas, Dallas)

Alexander Ihler (University of California, Irvine)

Junkyu Lee (IBM Research)

Bobak Pezeshki (University of California, Irvine)

Nicholas Cohen (University of California, Irvine)

Anna K. Raichev (University of California, Irvine)

-------- Forwarded Message --------

Subject:	The UAI 2022 competition
Date:	Tue, 24 May 2022 21:42:35 -0400
From:	Rina Dechter <dec...@ics.uci.edu>

Dear members of AI Inference and Machine Learning Communities,

After several years of slumber, we are pleased to announce the resurrection of the UAI inference competition. This year we introduce a new machine learning component to the competition (read more below). 

The goal of this competition is to explore our communities’ various approaches to approximating quantities of graphical models such as the partition function or probability of evidence,  the MAP and the  marginal MAP values, evaluating the algorithms on an array of problems with varying difficulties. As alluded to, this year we also include a new category that hosts the machine learning challenge: multi-label classification (MLC), extending the competition to exploring various learning algorithms.  We hope this event will continue to stimulate algorithms development and especially assess the state of the art in solvers for inference and learning  in graphical models. 

The timeline for the competition is as follows:

June, 2022

• sample benchmarks to be released
• solver submission opens (June 15th)

July, 2022

• solver evaluations begin

August, 2022

• mid-competition update (to be announced at UAI-2022)

October, 2022

• solver submissions close
• final competition results announced!

More information can be found on this year’s competition website: https://uaicompetition.github.io/uci-2022/

We encourage anyone interested - whether new to the field or veterans - to join!  Please reach out to us via uaicomp...@gmail.com with any questions.

We look forward to hearing from you and including your solvers in the competition!

UAI-2022 Competition Organizers

Rina Dechter (University of California, Irvine)
Vibhav Gogate (University of Texas, Dallas)

Alexander Ihler (University of California, Irvine)

Junkyu Lee (IBM Research)

Bobak Pezeshki (University of California, Irvine)