Abstract: The current approach to materials design, driven by strategic experimentation and supported by physics-based simulation across relevant scales, has been the standard for decades. While the theoretical component in this workflow provides valuable understanding of material behavior, it often fails to deliver actionable guidance for implementation. Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), together with high-performance computing (HPC), now offer a viable pathway to close this gap and accelerate both discovery and process optimization. This presentation will outline practical approaches for integrating AI/ML with HPC-enabled, high-throughput computation to explore high-dimensional search spaces. Examples will include the development of engineering alloys for extreme environments, the use of neural networks to rapidly improve computational thermodynamic models, and vapor processing optimization for the manufacturing of ultra-high-temperature ceramics. I will highlight how scientific insight and domain expertise remain essential for translating surrogate model predictions into impactful outcomes. Finally, I will conclude with current challenges and future opportunities for AI/HPC-driven materials research.

Speaker: Dongwon Shin
This seminar will be held in person and online

Join Zoom Meeting: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/93730374357?pwd=YDLJ7ELqOQnTZEQhlN8Pa4TuhaiFK8.1
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Abstract: How do humans learn the sound patterns of their language? Despite a variety of methods and advances in phonotactic learning, there is still a paucity of computational research, methods and data for languages with tones. In this talk, I will explore this question specifically in light of tone languages, where pitch plays a crucial role in distinguishing words' meaning. I provide an implementation of the Bottom-Up Factor Inference Algorithm over Autosegmental Representations (BUFIA-AR), which learns the rules governing possible tone patterns. Using a dataset of Hausa, a West African tone language, the algorithm successfully identifies patterns that are not permitted in the language. These results (i) confirm long-standing linguistic generalizations, (ii) make more specific predictions about exceptional cases, and (iii) reveal previously unnoticed patterns. The results show how mathematical models of sound structure can be brought into dialogue with both linguistic theory and computational learning, highlighting the broader potential of formal approaches to capture human linguistic knowledge.

Bio: Han Li is a fifth-year Ph.D. student in Linguistics department, specializing in computational linguistics under the supervision of Professor Jeff Heinz. Her research focuses on how sound patterns in language can be formally represented and computationally learned, bridging theoretical linguistics and computer science.

Location: Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Seminar Room

Zoom Meeting: https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/94043459206?pwd=3ra47h8HghOFRfobRBjZaDMyTwialr.1
Meeting ID: 940 4345 9206
Passcode: 332717


Time: Jan 26, 2021 03:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

All are welcome!

Zoom Meeting:
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/93818552212?pwd=ajZkT2x4a2tiaDJUL1h3VFhLZEgwQT09

Meeting ID: 938 1855 2212
Passcode: 802722

Title: Data-Driven Document Unwarping

Abstract: Capturing document images is a common way to digitize and record physical documents due to the ubiquitousness of mobile cameras. To make text recognition easier, it is often desirable to digitally flatten a document image when the physical document sheet is folded or curved. However, unwarping a document from a single image in natural scenes is very challenging due to the complexity of document sheet deformation, document texture, and environmental conditions. Previous model-driven approaches struggle with inefficiency and limited generalizability. In this thesis, I investigate several data-driven approaches to tackle the document unwarping problem.

Data acquisition is the central challenge in data-driven methods. I first design an efficient data synthesis pipeline based on 2D image warping and train DocUNet, the pioneering data-driven document unwarping model, on the synthetic data. A benchmark dataset is also created to facilitate comprehensive evaluation and comparison. To improve the unwarping performance by training on more realistic data, I introduce the Doc3D dataset and DewarpNet. Supervised by 3D shape ground truth in Doc3D, DewarpNet is significantly better than DocUNet. DocUNet and DewarpNet depend on the synthetic data for the ground truth deformation annotation. To exploit the real-world images, I propose PaperEdge, a weakly supervised model trained with in-the-wild document images with easy-to-obtain boundary information. PaperEdge surpasses DewarpNet by utilizing both the synthetic data and weakly annotated real data in the Document In the Wild (DIW) dataset. Finally, I propose to incorporate the 3D physical constraints in training DewarpNet and PaperEdge. The constraints regulate the possible deformations on document papers. I also propose to augment the Doc3D and DIW dataset by introducing an online document segmentation model and better hardware.
Join a faculty development program to support instructors across campus with navigating/integrating AI in their courses. We're inviting interested faculty to participate in the grant project called Fostering Writing-to-Learn Skills with Critical AI Literacy: A Faculty Development and Student Support Program (funded through the AI3 Institute).

Time commitment and completion requirements :

  • Attend four sessions and a final symposium on the following dates/times:

    • Friday, September 12 from 11am - 12:30pm over Zoom

    • Friday, September 26 from 11am - 12:30pm over Zoom

    • Friday, October 10 from 11am - 12:30pm over Zoom

    • Friday, October 24 from 11am - 12:30pm over Zoom

    • Friday, November 14 from 10am - 1pm in Wang 201 - please note that this is an in person session only

  • Engage with online materials in Brightspace prior to each of the sessions (mainly to update a syllabus, assignment, or teaching strategy that you can share and discuss at the workshop)

Contact: Shyam Sharma, Christine Fena, and Rose Tirotta-Esposito with questions.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b51tvfK0HSOkCW7cwYq2nyyeeHtvBZYC7_XHv7Av8wQ/edit?tab=t.0
Title: Class visual similarity based noisy sample removal in generative Few Shot Learning
Time: Thursday, Feb 4, 11:30am - 1:00pm
Zoom:
https://stonybrook.zoom.us/j/8563646526?pwd=anJna1gzUStXNlNVSUIzdDRUSC9CUT09

Meeting ID: 856 364 6526
Passcode: 203791



Abstract:  

Over the past decade, larger datasets, hardware accelerations, and network architecture improvements have contributed to phenomenal achievements in many tasks of computer

vision. However, in the absence of large datasets, computer vision models struggle to learn

general representations which results in poor performance. Few-shot learning tries to address 

this problem by proposing models which learn from a few examples.


I first give an overall review of few-shot learning methods. I particularly focus on generative Few Shot Learning(FSL) methods, which augment the scarce categories in a dataset by generating samples for those rare categories. As the actual class distribution can be complex and lie very close to each other, the sample generated for one class can be noisy or lie close to another class.  However, none of the current FS generative methods perform any form of quality control of the generated samples.


In this work, I propose to identify and remove the generated samples that are less likely to be in the distribution of the few-shot class. Here I particularly deal with few-shot scenarios where the

prior information of the relationship between the classes based on visual  similarity is available. The main idea is to exploit these priors to better identify the unreliable generated samples.


Particularly, I have proposed two methods based on class relationship to detect noisy generated samples. In the first method, we assume that the embedding space of each class follows a Gaussian distribution.  From this assumption, I propose Gaussian Neighborhood (GN), a method to estimate how likely a generated sample is drawn from the estimated distribution of a few-shot class.  We evaluate this method on the Hematopoiesis dataset.  By simply eliminating samples based on thresholding our proposed GN scores, the few-shot  classification  performance  is  improved by 5% and 2% in five shot and one shot respectively, compared to the model trained on all generated images. 


The GN scores represent the similarity distances from the generated samples to their classes, based on the assumption that each class is a Gaussian distribution.  However, this assumption might be strict in many scenarios since the real distributions of data can be arbitrarily complex.  Thus in my second proposed method, I aim to learn such similarity distances directly from data via metric learning. I propose to train a deep-network to regress the similarity distance between a pair of samples.  This network is trained using both the class-level  visual  similarity  information  and  the  class  labels.   This method improves the 1-shot and 5-shot classification performances by 0.5% and 1% respectively, compared to GN.


Reception to follow.

Abstract:
In this talk, I will present our journey of developing diverse, adaptive, uncertainty-calibrated AI planning agents that can robustly communicate and collaborate for multi-agent reasoning (on math, commonsense, coding, etc.) as well as for interpretable, controllable multimodal generation (across text, images, videos, audio, layouts, etc.). In the first part, we will discuss improving reasoning via multi-agent discussion among diverse LLMs and structured distillation of these discussion graphs (ReConcile, MAGDi), adaptively learning to balance abstraction, decomposition, refinement, and fast+slow thinking in LLM-agent reasoning (ReGAL, ADaPT, MAgICoRe, System-1.x), as well as confidence calibration in LLMs via speaker-listener pragmatic reasoning and making LLMs better teammates via multi-agent positive-negative persuasion balancing (LACIE, PBT). In the second part, we will discuss interpretable and control-lable multimodal generation via LLM-agents based planning and programming, such as layout-controllable image generation (and evaluation) via visual programming (VPGen+VPEval), consistent multi-scene video generation via LLM-guided planning (VideoDirectorGPT), interactive and composable any-to-any multimodal generation (CoDi, CoDi-2), as well as feedback-driven multi-agent interaction for adaptive environment/data generation via weakness discovery (EnvGen, DataEnvGym).
Bio:
Dr. Mohit Bansal is the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor and the Director of the MURGe-Lab (UNC-NLP Group) in the Computer Science department at UNC Chapel Hill. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 2013 and his BTech from IIT Kanpur in 2008. His research expertise is in natural language processing and multimodal machine learning, with a particular focus on multimodal generative models, grounded and embodied semantics, faithful language generation, and interpretable, efficient, and generalizable deep learning.
CSE 656 Seminars in Computer Vision - Wednesdays 11:30am-12:50pm, Room NCS 120

The overall purpose of this seminar is to bring together people with interests in Computer Vision theory and techniques and to examine current research issues. This course will be appropriate for people who already took a Computer Vision graduate course or already had research experience in Computer Vision. To enroll in this course, you must either: (1) be in the PhD program or (2) receive permission from the instructors.

Each seminar will consist of multiple short talks (around 10 minutes) by multiple people. Students can register for 1 credit for CSE656. Registered students must attend and present a minimum of 2 or 3 talks. Everyone else is welcome to attend. Fill in https://forms.gle/pCVXovgfMfQwGqG38 to subscribe to our mailing list for further announcement.
Language shared online through social media or messaging reflects people's thoughts and emotions. Processing this data with Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning can reveal mental health and psychological traits. For example, analyzing Facebook posts enables me to predict depression before it is clinically diagnosed and highlight particular symptoms. At the population level, billions of geo-tagged Tweets can be used to monitor health risk patterns, including depression and anxiety trends across communities. Beyond assessment, I'm using Large Language Models (LLMs) to improve mental health care, including training therapists and assisting with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. These applications of NLP and Al may lead to earlier and more effective interventions and improved access for underserved populations. Speaker: Johannes Eichstaedt, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Psychology & Human-Centered Al, Stanford University
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https://stonybrookuniversity.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_a9PVlBw0E1Bal1A?