TILOS-SDSU Seminar: AI/ML & NLP for UAS/Air Traffic Management
2024-10-02 11:00 - 12:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Dr, San Diego, 92182, United States
Krishna Kalyanam, NASA Ames Research Center
Abstract: We introduce several Air Traffic Management (ATM) initiatives envisioned by NASA and FAA for a future airspace that combines conventional traffic and new entrants (e.g., drones) without sacrificing safety. In this framework, we demonstrate the use of state-of-the-art AI/ML modeling and prediction tools that will enable efficient and safe traffic flow in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS). For example, Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools can help extract data (e.g., airspace constraints) that are currently contained in legacy text and audio format and convert them into digital information. The digitized information can be ingested by route planning, arrival scheduling and other decision support tools both on the ground and in the flight deck. We show how historical data (track, weather & events) can be preprocessed and utilized to create accurate models to predict flight trajectories and events of interest (e.g., Traffic Management Initiatives). We show several application areas within ATM that benefit from AI/ML including trajectory prediction, airport runway configuration management and automatic speech to text. The overarching goal of the work is to accelerate the integration of package delivery drones, air taxis and autonomous cargo aircraft into the NAS without impacting the safety and efficacy of current manned operations. As an example, we also show a strategic deconfliction scenario and demonstrate scalable algorithms that provide conflict free schedules for package delivery drones in an urban setting.

Dr. Krishna Kalyanam is the Autonomy & AI/ML tech lead with the NASA Aeronautics Research Institute (NARI). In his current role, he is focused on delivering state of the art AI/ML algorithms to enable scalable and efficient manned/unmanned operations in a mixed-use National airspace. Prior to joining NASA, Dr. Kalyanam was with AFRL’s Autonomous Controls branch, where he co-designed several multi-UAV cooperative control algorithms that were flight tested as part of the Intelligent Control & Evaluation of Teams (ICE-T) program. Dr. Kalyanam has published 100+ papers on stochastic control, human machine teaming and multi-agent scheduling in IEEE, ASME and AIAA venues. Dr. Kalyanam is a senior member of IEEE and an associate fellow of the AIAA. He is a recipient of the prestigious Research associateship award sponsored by the National Academies. He was also part of the UAV Autonomy team that won the AFRL “Star Team” award for performing the most innovative in-house basic research in 2018.

TILOS Seminar: Data Models for Deep Learning: Beyond i.i.d. Assumptions
2024-11-07 16:00 - 17:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Elchanan Mossel, Professor of Mathematics, MIT
Abstract: Classical Machine Learning theory is largely built upon the assumption that data samples are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) from general distribution families. In this talk, I will present novel insights that emerge when we move beyond these traditional assumptions, exploring both dependent sampling scenarios and structured generative distributions. These perspectives offer fresh theoretical frameworks and practical implications for modern machine learning approaches.

Elchanan Mossel is a Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), specializing in probability theory, combinatorics, and theoretical computer science. His research explores a range of complex, interdisciplinary problems, including social choice theory, inference in networks, and the analysis of algorithms, with applications across economics, political science, and genetics. Mossel completed his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and held postdoctoral positions at Microsoft Research and UC Berkeley before joining MIT. Recognized for his innovative work, Mossel has received a Sloan fellowship, NSF CAREER award, and COLT best paper award, and is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

TILOS Seminar: Off-the-shelf Algorithmic Stability
2024-11-13 11:00 - 12:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Rebecca Willett, University of Chicago
Abstract: Algorithmic stability holds when our conclusions, estimates, fitted models, predictions, or decisions are insensitive to small changes to the training data. Stability has emerged as a core principle for reliable data science, providing insights into generalization, cross-validation, uncertainty quantification, and more. Whereas prior literature has developed mathematical tools for analyzing the stability of specific machine learning (ML) algorithms, we study methods that can be applied to arbitrary learning algorithms to satisfy a desired level of stability. First, I will discuss how bagging is guaranteed to stabilize any prediction model, regardless of the input data. Thus, if we remove or replace a small fraction of the training data at random, the resulting prediction will typically change very little. Our analysis provides insight into how the size of the bags (bootstrap datasets) influences stability, giving practitioners a new tool for guaranteeing a desired level of stability. Second, I will describe how to extend these stability guarantees beyond prediction modeling to more general statistical estimation problems where bagging is not as well known but equally useful for stability. Specifically, I will describe a new framework for stable classification and model selection by combining bagging on class or model weights with a stable, “soft” version of the argmax operator. This is joint work with Jake Soloff and Rina Barber.

Rebecca Willett is a Professor of Statistics and Computer Science and the Director of AI in the Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago, and she holds a courtesy appointment at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago. Her research is focused on machine learning foundations, scientific machine learning, and signal processing. Willett received the inaugural Data Science Career Prize from the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2024, was named a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2021, and was named a Fellow of the IEEE in 2022. She is the Deputy Director for Research at the NSF-Simons Foundation National Institute for Theory and Mathematics in Biology, Deputy Director for Research at the NSF-Simons Institute for AI in the Sky (SkAI), and a member of the NSF Institute for the Foundations of Data Science Executive Committee. She is the Faculty Director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship. She helps direct the Air Force Research Lab University Center of Excellence on Machine Learning. She received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2007, was a DARPA Computer Science Study Group member, and received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program award in 2010. She completed her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rice University in 2005. She was an Assistant and then tenured Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University from 2005 to 2013. She was an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Harvey D. Spangler Faculty Scholar, and Fellow of the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2013 to 2018.

TILOS Seminar: How Transformers Learn Causal Structure with Gradient Descent
2024-11-20 11:00 - 12:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Jason Lee, Princeton University
Abstract: The incredible success of transformers on sequence modeling tasks can be largely attributed to the self-attention mechanism, which allows information to be transferred between different parts of a sequence. Self-attention allows transformers to encode causal structure which makes them particularly suitable for sequence modeling. However, the process by which transformers learn such causal structure via gradient-based training algorithms remains poorly understood. To better understand this process, we introduce an in-context learning task that requires learning latent causal structure. We prove that gradient descent on a simplified two-layer transformer learns to solve this task by encoding the latent causal graph in the first attention layer. The key insight of our proof is that the gradient of the attention matrix encodes the mutual information between tokens. As a consequence of the data processing inequality, the largest entries of this gradient correspond to edges in the latent causal graph. As a special case, when the sequences are generated from in-context Markov chains, we prove that transformers learn an induction head (Olsson et al., 2022). We confirm our theoretical findings by showing that transformers trained on our in-context learning task are able to recover a wide variety of causal structures.

Jason Lee is an associate professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (secondary) at Princeton University. Prior to that, he was in the Data Science and Operations department at the University of Southern California and a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley working with Michael I. Jordan. Jason received his PhD at Stanford University advised by Trevor Hastie and Jonathan Taylor. His research interests are in the theory of machine learning, optimization, and statistics. Lately, he has worked on the foundations of deep learning, representation learning, and reinforcement learning. He has received the Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Award, NSF Career Award, ONR Young Investigator Award in Mathematical Data Science, Sloan Research Fellowship, NeurIPS Best Student Paper Award and Finalist for the Best Paper Prize for Young Researchers in Continuous Optimization, and Princeton Commendation for Outstanding Teaching.

NSF Workshop on AI for Electronic Design Automation
2024-12-10 | CA

TILOS Seminar: Unlearnable Facts Cause Hallucinations in Pretrained Language Models
2025-01-29 11:00 - 12:30 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Adam Tauman Kalai, OpenAI
Abstract: Pretrained language models (LMs) tend to preserve many qualities present in their training data, such as grammaticality, formatting, and politeness. However, for specific types of factuality, even LMs pretrained on factually correct statements tend to produce falsehoods at high rates. We explain these “hallucinations” by drawing a connection to binary classification, enabling us to leverage insights from supervised learning. We prove that pretrained LMs (which are “calibrated”) fail to mimic criteria that cannot be learned. Our analysis explains why pretrained LMs hallucinate on facts such as people’s birthdays but not on systematic facts such as even vs. odd numbers.
Of course, LM pretraining is only one stage in the development of a chatbot, and thus hallucinations are *not* inevitable in chatbots.
This is joint work with Santosh Vempala.

Adam Tauman Kalai is a Research Scientist at OpenAI working on AI Safety and Ethics. He has worked in Algorithms, Fairness, Machine Learning Theory, Game Theory, and Crowdsourcing. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. He has served as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech and TTIC, and is on the science team of the whale-translation Project CETI. He has co-chaired AI and crowdsourcing conferences and has numerous honors, most notably the Majulook prize.

TILOS-SDSU Seminar: Challenging Estimation Problems in Vehicle Autonomy
2025-02-12 11:00 - 12:00 | San Diego State University, 5500 Campanile Dr, San Diego, 92182, United States
Rajesh Rajamani, University of Minnesota
Abstract: This talk presents some interesting problems in estimation related to vehicle autonomy. First, a teleoperation application in which a remote operator can intervene to control an autonomous vehicle is considered. Fundamental challenges here include the need to design an effective teleoperation station, bandwidth and time-criticality constraints in wireless communication, and the need for a control system that can handle delays. A predictive display system that uses generative AI to estimate the current video display for the teleoperator from fusion of delayed camera and Lidar images is developed. By estimating trajectories of the ego vehicle and of other nearby vehicles on the road, realistic intermediate updates of the remote vehicle environment are used to compensate for delayed camera data. A different estimation application involving the driving of a vehicle with automated steering control on snow-covered and rural roads is considered next. Since camera-based feedback of lane markers cannot be used, sensor fusion algorithms and RTK-corrected GPS are utilized for lateral position estimation. Finally, the modification of target vehicle tracking methods utilized on autonomous vehicles for use on other low-cost platforms is considered. Applications involving protection of vulnerable road users such as e-scooter riders, bicyclists and construction zone workers is demonstrated. The fundamental theme underlying the different estimation problems in this seminar is the effective use of nonlinear vehicle dynamic models and novel nonlinear observer design algorithms.

Rajesh Rajamani obtained his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and his B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras. He joined the faculty in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Minnesota in 1998 where he is currently the Benjamin Y.H. Liu-TSI Endowed Chair Professor and Associate Director (Research) of the Minnesota Robotics Institute. His active research interests include estimation, sensing and control for smart and autonomous systems.
Dr. Rajamani has co-authored over 190 journal papers and is a co-inventor on 20+ patents/patent applications. He is a Fellow of IEEE and ASME and has been a recipient of the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, the O. Hugo Schuck Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the Ralph Teetor Award from SAE, the Charles Stark Draper award from ASME, and a number of best paper awards from journals and conferences. Several inventions from his laboratory have been commercialized through start-up ventures co-founded by industry executives. One of these companies, Innotronics, was recently recognized among the 35 Best University Start-Ups of 2016 by the US National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer.

Secure AI for Health, Defense, and Beyond
2025-02-19 - 2025-02-20 | CA

TILOS Tutorial on AI Alignment
2025-03-06 08:30 - 12:15 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States

TILOS Seminar: Synthetic Tasks as Testbeds for Attributing Model Behavior
2025-03-12 11:00 - 12:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Surbhi Goel, University of Pennsylvania
Abstract: Understanding how different components of the machine learning pipeline—spanning data composition, architectural choices, and optimization dynamics—shape model behavior remains a fundamental challenge. In this talk, I will argue that synthetic tasks, which enable precise control over data distribution and task complexity, serve as powerful testbeds for analyzing and attributing behaviors in deep learning. Focusing on the sparse parity learning problem, a canonical task in learning theory, I will present insights into: (1) the phenomenon of “hidden progress” in gradient-based optimization, where models exhibit consistent advancement despite stagnating loss curves; (2) nuanced trade-offs between data, compute, model width, and initialization that govern learning success; and (3) the role of progressive distillation in implicitly structuring curricula to accelerate feature learning. These findings highlight the utility of synthetic tasks in uncovering empirical insights into the mechanisms driving deep learning, without the cost of training expensive models. This talk is based on joint work with a lot of amazing collaborators: Boaz Barak, Ben Edelman, Sham Kakade, Bingbin Liu, Eran Malach, Sadhika Malladi, Abhishek Panigrahi, Andrej Risteski, and Cyril Zhang.

Surbhi Goel is the Magerman Term Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. She is associated with the theory group, the ASSET Center on safe, explainable, and trustworthy AI systems, and the Warren Center for Network and Data Sciences. Surbhi’s research focuses on theoretical foundations of modern machine learning paradigms, particularly deep learning, and is supported by Microsoft Research and OpenAI. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research NYC and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin under Adam Klivans, receiving the UTCS Bert Kay Dissertation Award. She has also been a visiting researcher at IAS, Princeton, and the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley. Surbhi co-founded the Learning Theory Alliance (LeT‐All) and holds several leadership roles, including Office Hours co-chair for ICLR 2024 and co-treasurer for the Association for Computational Learning Theory.

TILOS-Cisco AI + Security Workshop
2025-03-17 | HDSI 123, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States

TILOS Seminar: Single location regression and attention-based models
2025-03-27 14:00 - 15:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Claire Boyer, Université Paris-Saclay
Abstract: Attention-based models, such as Transformer, excel across various tasks but lack a comprehensive theoretical understanding, especially regarding token-wise sparsity and internal linear representations. To address this gap, we introduce the single-location regression task, where only one token in a sequence determines the output, and its position is a latent random variable, retrievable via a linear projection of the input. To solve this task, we propose a dedicated predictor, which turns out to be a simplified version of a non-linear self-attention layer. We study its theoretical properties, by showing its asymptotic Bayes optimality and analyzing its training dynamics. In particular, despite the non-convex nature of the problem, the predictor effectively learns the underlying structure. This work highlights the capacity of attention mechanisms to handle sparse token information and internal linear structures.

Boston Symmetry Day 2025
2025-03-31 | CA

TILOS Seminar: Foundational Methods for Foundation Models for Scientific Machine Learning
2025-04-02 11:00 - 12:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Michael W. Mahoney, ICSI, LBNL, and Department of Statistics, UC Berkeley
Abstract: The remarkable successes of ChatGPT in natural language processing (NLP) and related developments in computer vision (CV) motivate the question of what foundation models would look like and what new advances they would enable, when built on the rich, diverse, multimodal data that are available from large-scale experimental and simulational data in scientific computing (SC), broadly defined. Such models could provide a robust and principled foundation for scientific machine learning (SciML), going well beyond simply using ML tools developed for internet and social media applications to help solve future scientific problems. I will describe recent work demonstrating the potential of the “pre-train and fine-tune” paradigm, widely-used in CV and NLP, for SciML problems, demonstrating a clear path towards building SciML foundation models; as well as recent work highlighting multiple “failure modes” that arise when trying to interface data-driven ML methodologies with domain-driven SC methodologies, demonstrating clear obstacles to traversing that path successfully. I will also describe initial work on developing novel methods to address several of these challenges, as well as their implementations at scale, a general solution to which will be needed to build robust and reliable SciML models consisting of millions or billions or trillions of parameters.

Michael W. Mahoney is at the University of California at Berkeley in the Department of Statistics and at the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI). He is also an Amazon Scholar as well as head of the Machine Learning and Analytics Group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He works on algorithmic and statistical aspects of modern large-scale data analysis. Much of his recent research has focused on large-scale machine learning, including randomized matrix algorithms and randomized numerical linear algebra, scientific machine learning, scalable stochastic optimization, geometric network analysis tools for structure extraction in large informatics graphs, scalable implicit regularization methods, computational methods for neural network analysis, physics informed machine learning, and applications in genetics, astronomy, medical imaging, social network analysis, and internet data analysis. He received his PhD from Yale University with a dissertation in computational statistical mechanics, and he has worked and taught at Yale University in the mathematics department, at Yahoo Research, and at Stanford University in the mathematics department. Among other things, he was on the national advisory committee of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI), he was on the National Research Council’s Committee on the Analysis of Massive Data, he co-organized the Simons Institute’s fall 2013 and 2018 programs on the foundations of data science, he ran the Park City Mathematics Institute’s 2016 PCMI Summer Session on The Mathematics of Data, he ran the biennial MMDS Workshops on Algorithms for Modern Massive Data Sets, and he was the Director of the NSF/TRIPODS-funded FODA (Foundations of Data Analysis) Institute at UC Berkeley. More information is available at https://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~mmahoney/.

TILOS Seminar: Amplifying human performance in combinatorial competitive programming
2025-04-16 11:00 - 12:00 | Virtual
Petar Veličković, Google DeepMind
Abstract: Recent years have seen a significant surge in complex AI systems for competitive programming, capable of performing at admirable levels against human competitors. While steady progress has been made, the highest percentiles still remain out of reach for these methods on standard competition platforms such as Codeforces. In this talk, I will describe and dive into our recent work, where we focussed on combinatorial competitive programming. In combinatorial challenges, the target is to find as-good-as-possible solutions to otherwise computationally intractable problems, over specific given inputs. We hypothesise that this scenario offers a unique testbed for human-AI synergy, as human programmers can write a backbone of a heuristic solution, after which AI can be used to optimise the scoring function used by the heuristic. We deploy our approach on previous iterations of Hash Code, a global team programming competition inspired by NP-hard software engineering problems at Google, and we leverage FunSearch to evolve our scoring functions. Our evolved solutions significantly improve the attained scores from their baseline, successfully breaking into the top percentile on all previous Hash Code online qualification rounds, and outperforming the top human teams on several. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first known AI-assisted top-tier result in competitive programming.

HOT-AI: Horizons for Optimization in AI Workshop
2025-04-17 - 2025-04-18 | HDSI 123, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States

TILOS Seminar: Optimal Quantization for LLMs and Matrix Multiplication
2025-05-23 11:00 - 12:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Yury Polyanskiy, MIT
Abstract: The main building block of large language models is matrix multiplication, which is often bottlenecked by the speed of loading these matrices from memory. A number of recent quantization algorithms (SmoothQuant, GPTQ, QuIP, SpinQuant etc) address this issue by storing matrices in lower precision. We derive optimal asymptotic information-theoretic tradeoff between accuracy of the matrix product and compression rate (number of bits per matrix entry). We also show that a non-asymptotic version of our construction (based on nested Gosset lattices and Conway-Sloan decoding), which we call NestQuant, reduces perplexity deterioration almost three-fold compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms (as measured on LLama-2, Llama-3 with 8B to 70B parameters). Based on a joint work with Or Ordentlich (HUJI), Eitan Porat and Semyon Savkin (MIT EECS).

Yury Polyanskiy is a Cutten Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of IDSS and LIDS at MIT, and an IEEE Fellow (2024). Yury received M.S. degree in applied mathematics and physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2005 and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2010. His research interests span information theory, machine learning and statistics. Dr. Polyanskiy won the 2020 IEEE Information Theory Society James Massey Award, 2013 NSF CAREER award and 2011 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award.

TILOS Industry Day 2025
2025-06-02 | HDSI 123, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States

TILOS-HDSI Seminar with Adam Klivans (UT Austin): A New Paradigm for Learning with Distribution Shift
2025-10-01 11:00 - 12:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Adam Klivans, The University of Texas at Austin
Abstract: We revisit the fundamental problem of learning with distribution shift, where a learner is given labeled samples from training distribution D, unlabeled samples from test distribution D′ and is asked to output a classifier with low test error. The standard approach in this setting is to prove a generalization bound in terms of some notion of distance between D and D′. These distances, however, are difficult to compute, and this has been the main stumbling block for efficient algorithm design over the last two decades.
We sidestep this issue and define a new model called TDS learning, where a learner runs a test on the training set and is allowed to reject if this test detects distribution shift relative to a fixed output classifier. This approach leads to the first set of efficient algorithms for learning with distribution shift that do not take any assumptions on the test distribution. Finally, we discuss how our techniques have recently been used to solve longstanding problems in supervised learning with contamination.

Adam Klivans is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and Director of the NSF AI Institute for Foundations of Machine Learning (IFML). His research interests lie in machine learning and theoretical computer science, in particular, Learning Theory, Computational Complexity, Pseudorandomness, Limit Theorems, and Gaussian Space. Dr. Klivans is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and serves on the editorial board for the Theory of Computing and Machine Learning Journal.
Zoom: https://bit.ly/TILOS-Seminars

Optimization for ML and AI Seminar with Courtney Paquette (McGill University): High-dimensional Optimization with Applications to Compute-Optimal Neural Scaling Laws
2025-10-24 11:00 - 12:00 | CSE 1242 and Virtual, 3235 Voigt Dr, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Courtney Paquette, McGill University
Abstract: Given the massive scale of modern ML models, we now only get a single shot to train them effectively. This restricts our ability to test multiple architectures and hyper-parameter configurations. Instead, we need to understand how these models scale, allowing us to experiment with smaller problems and then apply those insights to larger-scale models. In this talk, I will present a framework for analyzing scaling laws in stochastic learning algorithms using a power-law random features model (PLRF), leveraging high-dimensional probability and random matrix theory. I will then use this scaling law to address the compute-optimal question: How should we choose model size and hyper-parameters to achieve the best possible performance in the most compute-efficient manner? Then using this PLRF model, I will devise a new momentum-based algorithm that (provably) improves the scaling law exponent. Finally, I will present some numerical experiments on LSTMs that show how this new stochastic algorithm can be applied to real data to improve the compute-optimal exponent.

Courtney Paquette is an assistant professor at McGill University in the Mathematics and Statistics department, a CIFAR AI Chair (MILA), and an active member of the Montreal Machine Learning Optimization Group (MTL MLOpt) at MILA. Her research broadly focuses on designing and analyzing algorithms for large-scale optimization problems, motivated by applications in data science, and using techniques that draw from a variety of fields, including probability, complexity theory, and convex and nonsmooth analysis. Dr. Paquette is a lead organizer of the OPT-ML Workshop at NeurIPS since 2020, and a lead organizer (and original creator) of the High-dimensional Learning Dynamics (HiLD) Workshop at ICML.
Zoom: https://bit.ly/Opt-AI-ML

Student and Postdoc Lunch at Zanzibar Cafe
2025-10-24 12:00 - 13:30 | Zanzibar Cafe at UC San Diego
Join fellow TILOS students and postdoctoral researchers for an informal lunch at Zanzibar Cafe, located on the second floor of Price Center.

Workshop on Topology, Algebra, and Geometry in Data Science (co-located with NeurIPS 2025)
2025-12-01 - 2025-12-02 | UC San Diego, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
We are thrilled to announce the first official TAG-DS Stand-Alone Event–TAG… We’re it! This will be a two day event, December 1 & 2, 2025, featuring keynotes, poster sessions, spotlight talks, collaboration activities, and community development. The dates and location were selected to align with NeurIPS 2025–twice the fun! The event will be hosted on the University of California San Diego campus both days and is readily accessible by public transit from downtown for those already planning to attend NeurIPS. There will be an associated Proceedings of Machine Learning Research volume for papers submitted to the archival track.

TILOS-SDSU Seminar with Jeremy Schwartz (Zoox)
2025-12-03 11:00 - 12:00 | SDSU and Virtual
Title and abstract TBA…

Jeremy Schwartz is a robotics engineer at Zoox with expertise in a wide variety of areas of mechanical and electrical engineering and computer science. His primary professional expertise is in autonomy and behavioral algorithms, and he has worked in the aerospace industry as well as ground robotics, specializing in autonomous systems of all kinds.

Optimization for AI and ML Seminar with Volkan Cevher (EPFL)
2025-12-03 13:00 - 14:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Title and abstract TBA…

Volkan Cevher received the B.Sc. (valedictorian) in electrical engineering from Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey, in 1999 and the Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA in 2005. He was a Research Scientist with the University of Maryland, College Park from 2006-2007 and also with Rice University in Houston, TX, from 2008-2009. Currently, he is an Associate Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and a Faculty Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Rice University. His research interests include machine learning, signal processing theory, optimization theory and methods, and information theory. Dr. Cevher is an ELLIS fellow and was the recipient of the Google Faculty Research award in 2018, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, a Best Paper Award at CAMSAP in 2015, a Best Paper Award at SPARS in 2009, and an ERC CG in 2016 as well as an ERC StG in 2011.
Zoom: https://bit.ly/Opt-AI-ML

Networking Lunch Reception at NeurIPS 2025
2025-12-04 12:00 - 14:00 | Mezé Greek Fusion, 345 Sixth Ave, San Diego, CA, 92101, United States
TILOS will host a networking lunch reception during NeurIPS 2025 at Mezé Greek Fusion from 12:00-2:00pm on Thursday, December 4, 2025. This event is open to all NeurIPS attendees affiliated with any of the NSF AI Research Institutes, as well as industry partners. Join us to connect with colleagues across the network of NSF AI Institutes, share research interests, and explore opportunities for collaboration.
Space is limited; please RSVP here by Monday, November 24, to help us plan accordingly.
📅 Date: Thursday, December 4, 2025🕛 Time: 12:00 – 2:00pm PST📍 Location: Mezé Greek Fusion, 345 Sixth Ave, San Diego, CA 92101 (3 blocks from the conference venue)

Optimization for ML and AI Seminar with Frank E. Curtis (Lehigh University)
2025-12-05 11:00 - 12:00 | HDSI 123 and Virtual, 3234 Matthews Ln, La Jolla, CA, 92093, United States
Title and abstract TBA…

Frank E. Curtis is a Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Lehigh University, where he has been employed since 2009. He received a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in 2003 with a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics, received a master’s degree in 2004 and Ph.D. degree in 2007 from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Science at Northwestern University, and spent two years as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University from 2007 until 2009. His research focuses on the design, analysis, and implementation of numerical methods for solving large-scale nonlinear optimization problems. He received an Early Career Award from the Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), and has received funding from various programs of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), including through a TRIPODS Phase I grant awarded to him and his collaborators at Lehigh, Northwestern, and Boston University. He has also received funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) and DoE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). He received, along with Leon Bottou (Meta AI) and Jorge Nocedal (Northwestern), the 2021 SIAM/MOS Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization. He was awarded, with James V. Burke (U. of Washington), Adrian Lewis (Cornell), and Michael Overton (NYU), the 2018 INFORMS Computing Society Prize. He and team members Daniel Molzahn (Georgia Tech), Andreas Waechter (Northwestern), Ermin Wei (Northwestern), and Elizabeth Wong (UC San Diego) were awarded second place in the ARPA-E Grid Optimization Competition in 2020. He currently serves as Area Editor for Continuous Optimization for Mathematics of Operations Research and serves as an Associate Editor for Mathematical Programming, SIAM Journal on Optimization, Operations Research, IMA Journal of Numerical Analysis, and Mathematical Programming Computation. He previously served as the Vice Chair for Nonlinear Programming for the INFORMS Optimization Society, and is currently very active in professional societies and groups related to mathematical optimization, including INFORMS, the Mathematics Optimization Society, and the SIAM Activity Group on Optimization.
Zoom: https://bit.ly/Opt-AI-ML

NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Differentiable Learning of Combinatorial Algorithms
2025-12-06 | San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA, United States
Combinatorial algorithms are fundamental across a wide range of domains, owing to their ability to model optimization and decision-making tasks under complex constraints. These algorithms underpin practical applications such as vehicle routing, network and chip design, clustering and information retrieval. Combinatorial problems are also prominent in various areas of machine learning such as natural language processing and robotics. Recent research has focused on leveraging neural networks to design novel combinatorial algorithms and to come up with techniques that allow seamless integration of classic combinatorial algorithms in differentiable neural network architectures. Developments in this field, commonly referred to as neural combinatorial optimization, have raised several fundamental questions that span both theory and practice.
In this workshop, we take a broad perspective on designing differentiable algorithms for combinatorial optimization. The goal of the workshop is to explore novel ideas in the design and applications of neural combinatorial optimization, as well as to improve our theoretical understanding of existing methods.

NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Optimization for Machine Learning
2025-12-06 | San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA, United States
Optimization lies at the heart of many machine learning algorithms and enjoys great interest in our community. Indeed, this intimate relation of optimization with ML is the key motivation for the OPT series of workshops. We aim to foster discussion, discovery, and dissemination of state-of-the-art research in optimization relevant to ML.
The focus of OPT 2025 is on “Statistics Meets Optimization”. Since its inception, stochastic optimization has been grounded in statistical principles. Today, many of the most pressing challenges in machine learning—such as generalization bounds, the training dynamics of overparameterized models, and the development of generative models—are directly inspired by statistical thinking. At the same time, the scale and complexity of modern datasets, along with the increasingly rich model classes used to represent them, pose new questions about how optimization algorithms interact with these structures—both computationally and statistically. For example, what role do data symmetries play in shaping optimization trajectories? How do statistical properties of the data affect the adaptivity and efficiency of learning algorithms? And how can optimization approaches be designed to scale with data while still preserving desirable statistical behavior? OPT 2025 will explore these questions with the goal of building bridges between the statistics and optimization communities, and highlighting their shared impact on the theory and practice of machine learning.

NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on Imageomics: Discovering Biological Knowledge from Images Using AI
2025-12-06 | San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA, United States
Imageomics is an emerging interdisciplinary field at the crossroads of machine learning (ML), computer vision (CV), and biological sciences. It leverages visual data—from microscopic images of single-cell species to videos of megafauna—to extract and analyze biological information, specifically traits. By grounding ML models in existing scientific knowledge, Imageomics aims to make traits computable from images, facilitating insights into the evolution and function of living organisms. Imageomics poses research problems that resonate with the broad machine-learning community: multimodal representation learning, object detection and tracking, few-shot learning, imbalanced-class learning, video understanding, 3D modeling, hierarchical learning, etc. When people leverage ML tools to solve biological questions, the foundational bridges between ML and biological sciences also provide opportunities to address key challenges in ML, creating a virtuous cycle between the two fields.
We welcome participation from anyone interested in learning about the field of Imageomics, including:

Biological Scientists who are interested in applying ML and CV to their research, or who want to learn how to use ML tools to analyze biological images.
Machine Learning Researchers who are interested in applying their expertise to biological image data, or who want to learn about the unique challenges and opportunities in this domain.

The workshop will feature keynote talks, paper presentations, and discussions on the latest research in Imageomics. We encourage participants to submit papers and demos related to the topics outlined in the Call For Papers. The workshop will also provide opportunities for networking and collaboration among researchers from diverse backgrounds.

NeurIPS 2025 Workshop on New Perspectives in Advancing Graph Machine Learning
2025-12-07 | San Diego Convention Center, San Diego, CA, United States
Graphs serve as a powerful representational framework for machine learning, and their integration has substantially advanced the field. Indeed, extensive studies have pushed forward graph machine learning (GML) in both theory and applications. Recently, new perspectives have been emerging in the machine learning community, including algebraic–topological analyses, foundation models, generative models, and large models in applications. Leveraging these ideas for core graph machine learning holds a lot of promise, including the dual benefit of deeper theoretical insight, new capabilities and more powerful, application-aligned algorithms and models. The aim of this workshop is to explore and connect these new perspectives on GML, and to identify overarching challenges and tools – in terms of theory, methodology, and modeling.
