Matus Telgarsky, New York University Abstract: This talk will give both an empirical overview and a few simple bonds controlling the optimization path, or implicit bias, of modern optimization methods such as Adam and Muon (and Friends). The talk will begin with empirical results demonstrating the implicit bias phenomenon with shallow networks and also transformers […]
René Vidal, University of Pennsylvania Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. However, their growing deployment has exposed fundamental limitations in faithfulness, safety, and transparency. In this talk, I will present a unified perspective on addressing these challenges through principled model interventions […]
Andre Wibisono, Yale University Abstract: Sampling is a fundamental algorithmic task with many connections to optimization. In this talk, we survey a recent algorithm for sampling known as the Proximal Sampler, which can be seen as a proximal discretization of the continuous-time Langevin dynamics, and achieves the current state-of-the-art iteration complexity for sampling in discrete […]
Modern AI systems, particularly large language models, vision-language models, and deep vision networks, are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as healthcare, autonomous driving, and legal decisions. Yet, their lack of transparency, fragility to distributional shifts between train/test environments, and representation misalignment in emerging tasks and data/feature modalities raise serious concerns about their trustworthiness. This […]
Title and abstract TBA... Ellen Vitercik is an Assistant Professor at Stanford with a joint appointment between the Management Science and Engineering department and the Computer Science department. Her research interests include machine learning, algorithm design, discrete and combinatorial optimization, and the interface between economics and computation. Before joining Stanford, Dr. Vitercik was a Miller […]
Tianyi Lin, Columbia University Direct alignment methods are increasingly used for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. However, these methods suffer from the likelihood displacement, which can be driven by noisy preference pairs that induce similar likelihood for preferred and dis-preferred responses. To address this issue, we consider doing derivative-free optimization based on […]
Title and abstract TBA... Andrej Risteski is an Associate Professor at the Machine Learning Department in Carnegie Mellon University. Prior to that, he was a Norbert Wiener Research Fellow jointly in the Applied Math department and IDSS at MIT. Dr. Risteski received his PhD in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University under the advisement […]
Contemporary vision models and vision–language models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, yet remain opaque, fragile, and difficult to align across tasks and modalities. This workshop aim to foster dialogue on the urgent need for transparent, reliable, and safe computer vision systems, especially in critical domains such as healthcare, transportation, and legal decision making. It brings together research […]
