Discussion of machine learning, its applications, and related ideas
A brown-bag (bring your own lunch) reading club at TReNDs Center held mainly for cross pollination of ideas and “out of the comfort zone” fun. We read and discuss papers, tutorials, or packs of papers and ideas at once. The topics span all areas of machine learning, with a focus on Deep Learning, but also venture into brain imaging and theories of how the brain works. The goal is to both learn and refine the knowledge of important foundational concepts and stay current with the literature.
Email Sergey Plis at splis@gsu.edu if you want to be added to the club’s Slack. If you’re already a part of the TReNDS Center, join the #reading_group channel on our Slack workspace.
A list of topics with associated materials can be found on our GitHub page.
Upcoming Meetings
Summer 2025
7/11/25 – Sparse Multi-Channel Variational Autoencoder for the Joint Analysis of Heterogeneous Data
7/18/25 – Bayesian Spatial Blind Source Separation via the Thresholded Gaussian Process
7/25/25 – TBA
8/01/25 – Deepseek Prover v2
8/15/25 – Ethical considerations for the use of brain–computer interfaces for cognitive enhancement
8/22/25 – TBA
Past Meetings
Summer 2025
6/20/25 – Multimodal contrastive learning for enhanced explainability in pediatric brain tumor molecular diagnosis – (slides)(video)
6/13/25 – Principled Sparsity for Efficient Deep Learning Across Computational Paradigms – Riyasat presents – (slides)(video)
6/06/25 – Causal Reasoning and Large Language Models: Opening a New Frontier for Causality – Selim presents – (slides)(video)
5/30/25 – Flex-MoE: Modeling Arbitrary Modality Combination via the Flexible Mixture-of-Experts – Joanne presents – (slides)(video)
5/23/25 – Deep Kalman Filters – Sir-Lord Wiafe presents – (slides)(video)
5/16/25 – Developing a nomogram model for predicting non-obstructive azoospermia using machine learning techniques – Jordan presents – (slides)
5/9/2025 – Artificial intelligence in neuroimaging: Opportunities and ethical challenges – Brad presents – (slides)(video)
Spring 2025
4/18/25 – MIND over Body: Adaptive Thinking using Dynamic Computation – Mrinal presents – (slides)(video)
4/11/25 – Recent advances in Alzheimer’s disease: mechanisms, clinical trials and new drug development strategies – Armina presents – (slides)(video)
4/04/25 – Rethinking the Usage of Batch Normalization and Dropout in the Training of Deep Neural Networks – Yaorong presents – (slides)(video)
3/28/25 – Disruption of the gut microbiota-inflammation-brain axis in unmedicated bipolar disorder II depression | Translational Psychiatry – Jordan presents – (slides)(video)
3/07/25 – The Platonic representation hypothesis – Sergey presents – (slides)(video)
2/21/25 – Deepseek prover v1.5 – Mike presents – (slides)(video)
2/14/25 – Causality-inspired Spatial-temporal Explanations for Dynamic Graph Neural Networks – Selim presents – (slides)(video)
2/07/25 – Semantics and Spatiality of Emergent Communication – Pavel presents – (slides)(video)
1/31/25 – Deliberative Alignment: Reasoning Enables Safer Language Models – TJ presents – (slides)(video)
1/24/25 – Deep Causality Variational Autoencoder Network for Identifying the Potential Biomarkers of Brain Disorders – Joanne presents – (slides)(video)
1/17/25 – DeepseekV3 – Mike presents – (slides)(video)
Fall 2024
12/06/24 – KAN: Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks by Liu et al. – TJ presents – (slides)(video)
11/22/24 – The lung microbiome regulates brain autoimmunity – Jordan presents – (slides)(video)
11/15/24 – Learning interpretable dynamical systems from fMRI data – Eloy presents – (slides)(video)
11/01/24 – Were RNNs All We Needed? – Sergey presents – (slides)(video)
10/25/24 – Advances in Mobile Sensing for Healthcare: Leveraging AI for Enhanced Health Monitoring – Dr. Runze Yan presents
10/18/24 – Learning a driving simulator – Mike presents – (slides)(video)
10/11/24 – Practice talk for proposal
10/04/24 – JDX (proposal-marketing)
9/27/24 – Understanding Spatiotemporal Patterns in Brain Network Dynamics: Methods and Applications from the Keilholz Lab – TJ presents – (slides)(video)
9/20/24 – The Distributed Information Bottleneck – Brad presents – (slides)(video)
9/6/24 – Tutorial on Gaussian Splatting – Mrinal presesnts – (slides)(video)
Summer 2024
8/30/24 – Scaling Monosemanticity: Extracting Interpretable Features from Claude 3 Sonnet – Mike presents – (slides)(video)
8/23/24 – Time Permutation Approaches to Self-Supervised Dynamic Neuroimaging (Proposal defense prep.) – Zafar presents
8/16/24 – Spherical Deformable U-Net: Application to Cortical Surface Parcellation and Development Prediction – William presents – (slides)(video)
07/26/24 – Octopuses – (slides)(video) – Jordan presents
07/19/24 – Quantum Computing – (slides)(video) – Armina presents
07/12/24 – Explainable, interpretable, and trustworthy AI for an intelligent digital twin – (slides)(video) – Zafar presents
06/28/24 – Getting aligned on Representational alignment – (slides)(video) – Pavel presents
06/21/24 – Brain LM Paper – (slides)(video) – Joanne presents
06/14/24 – Bitter Lesson by Rich Sutton – (slides)(video) – Sergey presents
06/07/24 – Mesh segmentation/parcellation – (slides)(video) – William presents
05/24/24 – Flash attention 1+2 – (slides)(video) – Mike presents
Spring 2024
05/03/24 – Segment anything in medical images – (slides)(video) – Mohamed presents
04/26/24 – Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage? – (slides)(video) – Riyasat presents
04/19/24 – A review of second-order blind identification methods – (slides)(video) – Yaorong presents
04/12/24 – Evaluation framework for interpretability methods Quantus (meta-Quantus) – (slides)(video) – Mahfuz presents
04/05/24 – Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with knowledge graphs – (slides)(video) – Mrinal presents
03/29/24 – How to guess a gradient – (slides)(video) – Pavel presents
03/22/24 – Emerging Trends in Fast MRI Using Deep-Learning Reconstruction on Undersampled k-Space Data: A Systematic Review – (slides)(video) – Brad presents
03/15/24 – Extensive childhood experience with Pokémon suggests eccentricity drives organization of visual cortex – (slides)(video) – Jordan presents
03/08/24 – A U-turn on Double Descent – (slides)(video) – Sergey presents
03/01/24 – Are Transformers Effective for Time Series Forecasting – (slides)(video) – Joanne presents
02/23/24 – A graph neural network framework for causal inference in brain networks – (slides)(video) – William presents
02/09/24 – Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners – (slides)(video) – Minoo presents
02/02/24 – Genotype and Phenotype Differences in CADASIL from an Asian Perspective – (slides)(video) – Jordan presents
01/26/24 – Progress measures for grokking via mechanistic interpretability – (slides)(video) – Sergey presents
01/19/24 – Longitudinal Modelling of Disease Progression – (slides) – Alex presents
01/12/24 – Community-Aware Transformer for Autism Prediction in fMRI Connectome – (slides)(video) – Joanne presents
Fall 2023
12/08/23 – Best Papers of 2023 – (slides)(video)
11/03/23 – Causal Algorithms Tutorial – (demo)(slides)(video) – Kseniya presents
10/27/23 – Voyager: GPT-4 Agents in Minecraft – (slides)(video) – Mike and Mateo present
10/20/23 – From sparse to soft Mixture of Experts – (slides)(video) – Riyasat presents
10/13/23 – Conditional Positional encodings for Vision Transformers – (slides)(video) – William presents
10/06/23 – Gradients without Backpropagation – (slides)(video) – Pavel presents
09/29/23 – Estimating Training Data Influence by Tracing Gradient Descent (slides)(video) – Mahfuz presents
09/22/23 – Contrastive Learning Inverts the Data Generating Process (slides)(video) – Yaorong presents
09/15/23 – Sparks of Plant Consciousness (slides)(video) – TJ presents
09/08/23 – ML-Ops in the cloud and beyond – (demo)(slides)(video) – Pratyush and Girish present
09/01/23 – Hiera: A Hierarchical Vision Transformer without the Bells-and-Whistles – (slides)(video) – Joanne presents
08/25/23 – Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification – (slides)(video) – Minoo presents
Summer 2023
08/18/23 – Contrast with Reconstruct: Contrastive 3D Representation Learning Guided by Generative Pretraining – (slides) (video) – Mrinal presents
08/11/23 – Learning to Exploit Temporal Structure for Biomedical Vision Language Processing – (slides) (video) – Zafar presents
07/28/23 – A somatic-cognitive action network alternates with effector regions in motor cortex – (slides) (notes) (video) – TJ presents
07/14/2023 – High Performance Compiler-Based Automatic Differentiation – (slides) (video) – Ludger presents (external speaker)
07/07/2023 – A Review on Multimodal Data Fusion Approaches (paper 1) (paper 2) (paper 3) – (video) (slides) Ibrahim presents
06/30/2023 – AI Institute June 2023 Workshop Discussion – (slides) Kseniya, Vaibhavi, and Pavel present
06/23/2023 – Label Propagation for Deep Semi-Supervised Learning (video) (slides) – Minoo presents
05/31/2023 – An Approach to Automatically Label & Order Brain Activity/Component Maps (video) (slides) – Joanne presents
05/26/2023 – Pointersect: Neural Rendering with Cloud Ray Intersection (video) (slides) – Mrinal presents
05/19/2023 – Efficiently Modeling Long Sequences with Structured State Spaces (video) (slides) – Eloy presents
05/12/2023 – Learning Dynamic Graph Representation of Brain Connectome with Spatio-Temporal Attention – (video) (slides) Sajad presents
05/05/2023 – Neural Collapse: A Review on Modelling Principles and Generalization (video) (slides) – Brad presents
Spring 2023
04/28/2023 – Causal Machine Learning for Healthcare and Precision Medicine (video) (slides) – Ibrahim presents
04/14/2023 – Toy Models of Superposition Continued (video) (slides) – Pavel presents
04/07/2023 – Singular Values For ReLU Layers (video) (slides) – Brad presents
03/31/2023 – On Causal and Anticausal Learning (video) (slides) – Sergey presents
03/24/2023 – Parameter Space Saliency Maps for Explainability (video) (slides) – Mahfuz presents
03/17/2023 – Unsupervised Deep Learning for Bayesian Brain MRI Segmentation (video) (slides) – William presents
03/10/2023 – Fixed Point Iterations in Deep Learning (video) – Mrinal presents
03/03/2023 – ChatGPT (video) (slides) – TJ presents
02/24/2023 – Towards Real-Time Object Detection With Region Proposal Networks (video) (slides) – Minoo presents
02/17/2023 – Galactica: A Large Language Model for Science (video) (slides) – Alexandre presents
02/10/2023 – Unfolding Argument: Why IIT and other causal structure theories cannot explain consciousness (video) (slides) – Kseniya presents
02/03/2023 – Superposition Memorization And Double Descent (video) (slides) – Eloy presents
01/27/2023 – Quantum Optimization – (video) (slides) – Anton presents
01/20/2023 – Non-Linear ICA (video) (slides) – Yaorong presents
01/13/2023 – Topology Preserving Deep Image Segmentation (video) – Noah presents
Fall 2022
11/18/2022 – Neural Race Reduction (video) (slides) – Brad presents
11/11/2022 – Improving Multimodal Fusion (video) (slides) – Ibrahim presents
11/08/2022 – Causal Learning Freeform Discussion (video) – David presents
10/28/2022 – AI & Art (video) (slides) – Farfalla presents
10/21/2022 – Multiplexed Immunofluorescence Imaging (video) (slides) – Mohamed presents
10/12/2022 – Quantum Machine Learning (video) (slides) – Pavel presents
10/07/2022 – Mixed Effect Spectral Vector Autoregressive Model (video) (slides) – Anastasia presents
09/30/2022 – Point Cloud Surface Reconstruction (video) (slides) – William presents
09/16/2022 – GATO (video) (slides) – TJ presents
09/09/2022 – Conformal Predictions (video) (slides) – Sergey presents
09/02/2022 – Monks and EEG – Kseniya presents
Summer 2022
08/26/2022 – Introspection with Influence Functions (video) – Noah presents
08/19/2022 – Label Propagation (paper 1) (paper 2) (video) (slides) – Minoo presents
08/05/2022 – ICML (& IJCNN) Highlights (video) (slides) – Alex, Mahfuz, and Sergey present
07/29/2022 – Deep Reinforcement Learning (video) (slides) – Eloy presents
07/22/2022 – Symmetry-Based Representations (video) – Eloy presents
07/15/2022 – Planning Meeting
07/08/2022 – Cortical Surface Generation (part 2) (video) (cortical++) (pialnn) (cortexode) – William presents
06/30/2022 – OHBM Recap (slides) – Group presents
06/17/2022 – Text-to-Image Generation (video) (slides) – TJ presents
06/10/2022 – Conformal Prediction – Sergey presents
06/03/2022 – Cortical Surface Generation Models (part 1) (video) (topofit) (deepcsr) (vox2cortex) – William presents
05/27/2022 – Dynamics in Shallow AutoEncoders (video) (slides) – Brad presents
05/20/2022 – Theories of Consciousness (video) (slides) – TJ presents
Spring 2022
04/29/2022 –Learning in High Dimensions Amounts to Extrapolation (video) – Sergey presents
04/23/2022 – GSU Demo Day
04/15/2022 – 1000 Brains Theory (slides) (video) – Eloy presents
04/08/2022 – Backprop and Neuroscience (slides) (video) – Brad presents
04/01/2022 – Recurrent Independent Mechanisms – Sergey presents
03/25/2022 – Topology Layer for Machine Learning (video) – Noah presents
03/18/2022 – Multimodal Few-Shot Learning (slides) (video) – Mrinal presents
03/11/2022 – Supervised Contrastive Learning (slides) (video) – Mahfuz presents
03/04/2022 – Time Series Forecasting (slides) (video) – Usman presents
02/25/2022 – Deep Learning in the Browser (slides) (video) – Mohamed presents
02/18/2022 – Alpha Fold (slides) (video) – TJ presents
02/11/2022 – Recurrent Models for Neuroimaging (video) (slides) – Yaorong presents
02/04/2022 – If deep learning is the answer what is the question? (video) (slides) – Brad presents
01/28/2022 – Cortical Flow (video) (slides) – William presents
01/21/2022 – Best Ideas of 2021 (video) (slides) – Group presentation
01/14/2022 – Multi Modal Deep Learning for Brain Development and Cognition – (video) (slides) – Yu-Ping presents
Fall 2021
12/17/2021 – Underspecification Challenges in Modern Machine Learning – Alex presents
12/10/2021 – The physics of higher-order interactions in complex systems (video) (slides) – Ashkan presents
12/03/2021 – Answer Set Programming (video) (slides) – Sajad presents
11/19/2021 – Upside-Down Reinforcement Learning (video) (slides) – TJ presents
11/12/2021 – Perspective on General AI (video) – Sergey presents
11/05/2021 – Mixed Integer Programming (video) – William presents
10/29/2021 – Multi-Task Self-Training (video) (slides) – Eloy and Noah present
10/22/2021 – Fit Without Fear (video) – Sergey presents
10/15/2021 – GPT-Codex (video) (slides) – Mrinal presents
10/08/2021 – MLP Mixers (video) (slides) – Alex presents
10/01/2021 – Dynamic Causal Models (video) (slides) – Jack presents
09/24/2021 – Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (video) (slides) – Eloy presents
09/17/2021 – Causation and Discovery: Concepts, methods, and applications (video) (slides)– David Danks presents (external speaker)
09/10/2021 – Symbolic Methods using Gradients for Neural Model Explanation (video) (slides) – Mahfuz presents
09/03/2021 – Causal Representation Learning (video) – Sergey presents
Summer 2021
08/20/2021 – Learning Function Structure in Neuromorphic Networks (video) (slides) – Amrit presents
08/13/2021 – Meshed-Memory Transformer (video) (slides) – William presents
08/06/2021 – Generative Vision model for Breaking Captcha (video) (slides) – Harsha presents
07/23/2021 – VAEs and Non-Linear ICA (video – part 1) (video – part 2) (slides) – Rogers presents
07/16/2021 – Reinforcement Learning (pt 2) (video) (slides)– TJ presents
07/09/2021 – Reinforcement Learning (pt 1) (video) (slides) – TJ presents
06/25/2021 – PixelCNN (video) – Will presents
06/18/2021 – How Neural Networks Extrapolate (video) – Kevin presents
06/04/2021 – Normalizing Flows (NICE) (NVP) (MADE) (video) (slides)– Eloy presents
05/28/2021 – Directed Functional Connectivity (video) (slides)– Thomas presents
05/21/2021 – Neural Turing Machines (video) (slides)– Eloy and Will present
05/14/2021 – Mythos of Model Interpretability– Sergey presents
05/07/2021 – Multi-Dimensional LSTMs (video) (slides) – Yaorong presents
Spring 2021
04/30/2021 – Energy Based Out of Distribution Detection (video) (slides) – Kevin presents
04/23/2021 – Every Model is a Kernel Machine (video) – Sergey presents
04/16/2021 – Neural Relational Inference for Interacting Systems (slides) (video) – Usman presents
04/09/2021 – Transformers with Feedback Memory (slides) (video) – Alex presents
04/02/2021 – Debugging Tests for Model Explanations (slides) (video) – Mahfuz presents
03/26/2021 – Hopfield Networks ARE all you need (slides) (video) – Noah Presents
03/19/2021 – Single-shot Network Pruning (slides) (video) – Riyasat and Noah present
03/12/2021 – “Brain, Language & Deep Learning” – Harsh presents
03/05/2021 – GIN-LiNGAM (slides) (video) – Sajad presents
2/26/2021 – Geometric Deep Learning (video) – Will presents
2/19/2021 – Intro to Causal Discovery (slides) (video) – Sergey presents
2/12/2021 – PowerSGD (slides) (video) – Brad presents
2/5/2021 – Dall-E (slides) (video) – Eloy presents
1/22/2021 – Multiplicative Interactions and Where to Find Them (slides) (video) – Alex presents
1/15/2021 – Siamese Networks and Self-Supervised Learning (slides) (video) – Eloy and Alex present
Fall 2020
12/11/2020 – Notable Work at NeurIPS 202 (slides) (video) – All present
12/04/2020 – Intelligence w/o Representation (slides) (video) – Eloy presents
11/20/2020 – Stacked Capsule Autoencoders (slides) (video) – Will presents
11/13/2020 – Learning Bifurcations (slides) (video) – Jack presents
11/06/2020 – Curriculum by Smoothing (slides) (video) – Alex presents
10/09/2020 – Transformers for Image Recognition (slides) (video) – Eloy presents
10/02/2020 – Overfitting in Classification (slides) – Thomas presents
09/25/2020 – Neural State Machines – Jack presents
09/18/2020 – Hierarchial LSTMs/ Adversarial LSTMs – William presents
09/11/2020 – MRI Segmentation (second paper) (slides) – Zafar Presents
09/04/2020 – World Models (slides) (video) – Eloy presents
8/28/2020 – Deep Learning for Right Reasons (video) (slides) – Noah presents
08/21/2020 – Sparsity Inducing Regularization (video) – Riyasat presents
Summer 2020
08/14/2020 – Inference of Causal Relations in Dynamical Systems
(Taken Theorem video) – Jack presents
08/07/2020 – Analytic Marching (slides) (video) – William presents
07/31/2020 – Learning Graph Representations
07/24/2020 – CNNs on Graphs (video) – Alex presents
07/10/2020 – Hierarchical LSTMs (video)– William presents
06/26/2020 – ANIL (slides) (video) – Alex presents
06/19/2020 – “Multitask Learning over graphs” (slides) (video) – Riyasat and Brad Present
06/12/2020 – MAML and iMAML – Alex presents
06/05/2020 – Contrastive Predictive Coding – Mahfuz presents
Spring 2020
05/29/2020 – Cutting out the Middle-Man:L Training and Evaluating Energy-Based Models without Sampling – Alex presents
05/22/2020 – Energy-Based Models – Video – Jack and Alex present
05/15/2020 – Noise Contrastive Estimation – Sergey presents
05/08/2020 – “Representation Learning” – Alex presents
05/01/2020 – ” Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks” – Alex presents
04/24/2020 – Fixed Point Layers (pt 2) – presented by Sergey
04/17/2020 – Fixed Point Layers – presented by Sergey
04/10/2020 – Multitask Learning – presented by Alex
03/13/2020 – A tutorial on Automatic Differentiation – presented by Sergey
03/06/2020 – Sanity Checks for Saliency Maps
02/28/2020 – Complexity control by gradient descent in deep networks
02/21/2020 – A mathematical theory of semantic development in deep neural networks
02/14/2020 – N/A
02/07/2020 – Exact solutions to the nonlinear dynamics of learning in deep linear neural networks
01/31/2020 – Data-driven discovery of coordinates andgoverning equations
01/24/2020 – Neural Networks in System Identification
01/17/2020 – A tutorial on hidden Markov models and selected applications in speech recognition
Fall 2019
12/06/2019 – Meta-learning for neuroimaging
11/22/2019 – Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction methods and a generalization
11/08/2019 – Stop Explaining Black Box Machine Learning Models for High Stakes Decisions and Use Interpretable Models Instead
11/01/2019 – Synthesizing Programs for Images using Reinforced Adversarial Learning
10/25/2019 – Introduction to Deep Q-Network
10/18/2019 – Hidden stratification
10/11/2019 – Neural Ordinary Differential Equations
10/04/2019 – Model Utility
09/27/2019 – Wasserstein GANs and other easier to train models
09/20/2019 – Generative Adversarial Networks (Intro)
09/13/2019 – Predictive coding theory of the mind: part II
09/06/2019 – Predictive coding theory of the mind: Intro
08/30/2019 – Confidence and accuracy: On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks
08/23/2019 – Deep learning model introspection
Summer 2019
08/16/2019 – Deep learning trends from the deep learning summer school
08/09/2019 – Variational Autoencoders: part II
08/02/2019 – Variational Autoencoders: part I
07/26/2019 – Attention in deep learning models: part II
07/19/2019 – Attention in deep learning models: part I
07/12/2019 – NLP successes of 2018: transfer learning
Brad Baker
Sergey Plis