MLR@Penn Workshop on Foundation Models

October 8, 2024

About the Workshop

This workshop is organized by MLR@Penn, a student organization dedicated to machine learning research at the University of Pennsylvania, and is co-located with the Conference on Language Modeling (COLM) 2024. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum to discuss recent advances in foundation models, where junior researchers (undergraduates, Master's students, PhD candidates, early career industry) can seek mentorship and learn from prominent contributors to the field.

While our workshop (in particular, the mentorship tables session) addresses a broad audience across the various language modeling topics listed in the COLM 2024 Call for Papers, the main focus of our panel and invited talk will be on a smaller set of topics which presently hold widespread interest, including:

Agents / Agentic Frameworks (Tools, Grounding, Multimodality)
Benchmarking (Development, Reliability)
Model Attribution and Interpretability (Emergent Abilities, Scaling Laws, (Mechanistic) Interventions, Probing)

We aim to promote meaningful dialogue and foster inclusivity by enabling researchers from diverse backgrounds to attend our program, who may otherwise not be able to receive mentorship or join networking opportunities to propel their careers.

Details

Date: October 8, 2024

Locations:

Houston: Hall of Flags: 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM
David Rittenhouse Labs: A8: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Schedule

Afternoon Session

Invited Talk: What was Revolutionized by the 'Transformer Revolution'?

12:30-1:30 PM EST

Stella Biderman

Stella Biderman

Executive Director, EleutherAI

Panel: Emerging Trends in Open Foundation Model Development

1:30-2:30 PM EST - Moderated by Keshav Ramji

Naomi Saphra

Naomi Saphra

Research Fellow, Kempner Institute at Harvard University

Ofir Press

Ofir Press

Postdoctoral Researcher, Princeton University Language and Intelligence

Chris Callison-Burch

Chris Callison-Burch

Professor, University of Pennsylvania CIS

Evening Session

Mentorship Tables

6-8 PM EST

(Mentors will be either in the 6-6:45 PM or 6:45-7:30 PM slot, or in both -- to be finalized)

Albert Gu

Albert Gu

Assistant Professor, CMU MLD; Chief Scientist, Cartesia AI

Yoon Kim

Yoon Kim

Assistant Professor, MIT EECS

Alane Suhr

Alane Suhr

Assistant Professor, UC Berkeley EECS

Xinyun Chen

Xinyun Chen

Senior Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

Mikhail Yurochkin

Mikhail Yurochkin

Research Staff Member, IBM Research & MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab

Diyi Yang

Diyi Yang

Assistant Professor, Stanford CS

Mohit Bansal

Mohit Bansal

Distinguished Professor, UNC Chapel Hill CS

Jiatao Gu

Jiatao Gu

Staff Research Scientist, Apple ML Research (MLR)

Daphne Ippolito

Daphne Ippolito

Assistant Professor, CMU LTI

Pratyush Maini

Pratyush Maini

PhD Student, CMU MLD; Founding Member, DatologyAI

Valentina Pyatkin

Valentina Pyatkin

Postdoctoral Researcher / Young Investigator, Allen Institute for AI + University of Washington

Alon Albalak

Alon Albalak

Member of Technical Staff, Data Team Lead, SynthLabs

Sewon Min

Sewon Min

Research Scientist, Allen Institute for AI; Incoming Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley EECS

Organizers

Keshav Ramji

IBM Research AI

Alok Shah

University of Pennsylvania

Sarah Swartz

University of Pennsylvania

Aalok Patwa

University of Pennsylvania

Khush Gupta

University of Pennsylvania

Kyle Zhang

University of Pennsylvania