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2025-05-13 12:00:00
2025-05-13 13:00:00
America/New_York
CSAIL Forum with Armando Solar-Lezama: Programming the way to better AI
Registration required: https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/TG0DF7tFQp-hS2BXku5ahAAbstract: For decades, programming was the way through which we told machines what to do, but modern AI techniques promise new ways of creating software directly from data and natural language. But programming has a number of advantages that have enabled us to build reliable large scale computing infrastructure. In this presentation, I explain some new approaches to learn from data while preserving some of the benefits of programming, and some of their applications in domains ranging from robotics to computational biology.
TBD
May 13
May 06
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2025-05-06 12:00:00
2025-05-06 13:00:00
America/New_York
CSAIL Forum with Manish Raghavan: The role of information diversity in AI systems
Registration required: https://mit.zoom.us/meeting/register/GP_RXB5BSTy_Ubf3wNJwxQAbstract:AI systems often consist of multiple actors or agents with different goals, incentives and critically, information. In this talk, we explore the role that heterogeneous information plays. Across decision-making, pricing, and production tasks, we show that social outcomes improve as information diversity increases. We discuss implications for the development, deployment, and use of AI.Bio: Manish Raghavan is the Drew Houston (2005) Career Development Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Before that, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS). His research centers on the societal impacts of algorithms and AI.
TBD
April 22
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2025-04-22 12:00:00
2025-04-22 13:00:00
America/New_York
CSAIL Forum with Prof Yoon Kim: Efficient and Expressive Architectures for Language Modeling
Efficient and Expressive Architectures for Language ModelingSpeaker: Yoon Kim, Assistant Professor, CSAIL Tuesday 12:00-1:00 EDT, April 22, 2025 live stream via Zoom: Registration requiredAbstract:Transformers are the dominant architecture for language modeling (and generative AI more broadly). The attention mechanism in Transformers is considered core to the architecture and enables accurate sequence modeling at scale. However, the complexity of attention is quadratic in input length, which makes it difficult to apply Transformers to model long sequences. Moreover, Transformers have theoretical limitations when it comes to the class of problems it can solve, which prevents their being able to model certain kinds of phenomena such as state tracking. This talk will describe some recent work on efficient alternatives to Transformers which can overcome these limitations.Bio: Yoon Kim is an assistant professor at MIT EECS and a principal investigator at CSAIL, where he works on natural language processing and machine learning. He obtained his Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University.
TBD
April 15
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2025-04-15 12:00:00
2025-04-15 13:00:00
America/New_York
CSAIL Forum with Prof Phillip Isola: The Platonic Representation Hypothesis
The Platonic Representation HypothesisSpeaker: Phillip Isola, Associate Professor, CSAIL Tuesday 12:00-1:00 EDT, April 15, 2025 In person: Hewlett 32-G882 in the Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street and live stream via Zoom: Registration requiredAbstract: I will argue that representations in different deep nets are converging. First, I will survey examples of convergence in the literature: over time and across multiple domains, the ways by which different neural networks represent data are becoming more aligned. Next, I will demonstrate convergence across data modalities: as vision models and language models get larger, they measure distance between datapoints in a more and more alike way. I will hypothesize that this convergence is driving toward a shared statistical model of reality, akin to Plato's concept of an ideal reality. We term such a representation the platonic representation and discuss several possible selective pressures toward it. Finally, I'll discuss the implications of these trends, their limitations, and counterexamples to our analysis.Bio: https://web.mit.edu/phillipi/www/bio.html
TBD