UChicago/TTIC NLP Seminar
Winter 2025
1/9: Annoucements and Lightning Talks (Organizers: Yichen (Zach) Wang, Harvey Fu, Chenghao Yang, Obi Obetta, and Shester Gueuwou)
1/16: Quiz Bowl (Lead by Harvey Fu)
1/23: [TTIC Talk] Will Merrill: Theoretical Computer Science as a Lens to Understand and Improve Large Language Models
1/27: [TTIC Talk] Ruiqi Zhong: Building Strong Language Models from Weak Validators
1/30: [TTIC Talk] Siddharth Karamcheti: Language-Driven Learning for Interactive Robotics
2/6: Songlin Yang: What's Next for Mamba? Toward More Expressive Recurrent Update Rules
2/13: [Joint Seminar with UChicago BioMed] Brett Beaulieu-Jones: How Can We Adapt NLP to Be Successful in Healthcare?
2/20: Shikhar Murty: Building the Learning-from-Interaction Pipeline for LLMs
Autumn 2024
10/3: Organizational Session
10/4: C&I Welcome Lunch (Organized by Chenghao Yang, supported by faculties)
10/10: Julie Kallini: Mission: Impossible Language Models (Best Paper Award at ACL 2024)
10/18: Symposium on Communication and Intelligence
10/24: Chenghao Yang: Tutorial on Inference-Time Compute [video]
10/25: [Research at TTIC] Zhewei Sun: Making NLP Systems Robust to Language Variation: The Case of Slang [Panopto Recording]
10/31: Katie Collins: Designing Human-Centric AI with Use in Mind
11/7: Chenghao Yang: Leveraging Large Language Models in Academic Settings: From Architecture to Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning and Quantization [slides]
11/14: Lexing Xie: Topics, Lexicons and Controversies in Daily Moral Dilemmas: What I Learned From /r/AITA
11/21: Julia Watson: Do language models practice what they preach? Examining language ideologies about gendered language reform encoded in LLMs
11/28: Thanksgiving
12/5: Mansi Sakarvadia: Mitigating Memorization in Language Models
Spring 2024
3/22: Zhewei Sun: Contextualizing Natural Language Agents: The Case of Slang
3/29: Ju-Chieh Chou: AV2Wav: Diffusion-Based Re-synthesis from Continuous Self-supervised Features for Audio-Visual Speech Enhancement
4/5: Jiashuo (Jessie) Wang: Emotion-Aware Dialogues and Beyond
4/12: Hao Peng: Pushing the Boundaries of Length Generalization and Reasoning Capabilities of Open LLMs
4/17: Skipped
4/26: Huan Sun: Powers and Peculiarities of "Reasoning" in Large Language Models and Agents
5/3: Chenghao Yang: Mechanistic Interpretability for Transformers: Compiling Transformer Models into Code [slides]
5/8: Skipped due to Frontiers of AI in Business and Society workshop in UIC
5/16: Skipped due to finals and conference deadlines
5/24: Mark Yatsker: Inherent Interpretability via Language Model Guided Bottleneck Design
Winter 2024
1/5: Hongyuan Mei: Large Language Models as Lego Blocks of Reasoning
1/12: Organizational Session
1/19: Skipped due to TTIC IDEAL Kickoff Workshop
1/26: Denny Zhou: Teach language models to reason
2/2: Mohit Iyyer: Evaluating and detecting long-form LLM-generated text
2/9: Lingyu Gao: Exploring Capabilities of the Generative Components of Pretrained Language Models
2/20: Chenhao Tan: Towards Human-centered AI: How to Generate Useful Explanations for Human-AI Decision Making
2/23: Eunsol Choi: Knowledge-Rich Language Systems in a Dynamic World
3/1: Skipped due to Student Visit Day
3/8: Chenghao Yang: Can You Follow Me? Testing Situational Understanding in ChatGPT
Autumn 2023
9/29: A symposium on Human+AI
10/6: Welcome
10/13: David Bau: Locating and editing the knowledge inside large neural models
10/20: Shester Gueuwou: Sign language process
10/27: Nazneen Rajani: Recipe for Training Helpful Chatbots
11/3: Alan Ritter: Towards Cost Efficient Use of Pre-trained Models
11/10: TTIC 20th Anniversary
11/17: Chenghao Yang and Marziyeh Movahedi: LLM inference and finetuning [slides]
11/24: Thanksgiving
12/1: Ankita Pasad: What do Speech Foundation Models Learn? Analysis and Applications
12/8: Byron Wallace: Interrogating zero- and few-shot learners