TAU-UIUC Workshop 2025 Schedule

9:00-9:15

Welcome & Overview of Collaborative Funding Opportunities

Rashid Bashir, Dean, Grainger College of Engineering, UIUC

Brian Rosen, Vice Dean for International Affairs in Engineering, TAU

9:15-10:45

Technical Session 

What diffusion models do: not what it says on the box, and worth fixing 

David Forsyth (UIUC)

Matching Data

Shai Avidan (TAU)

Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos Without Physical Demonstrations

Svetlana Lazebnik (UIUC)

10:45-11:15

Break

11:15-12:15

Technical Session 

Never Stop Learning

Derek Hoiem (UIUC)

Explainable AI: Theory and Algorithms

Ran Gilad-Bachrach (TAU)

12:15-1:00

Lunch

1:00-2:00pm

Walking Tour of Engineering Quad

2:00-3:30pm

Technical Session 

Importance learning: When tails dominate the signal

Baron Peters (UIUC)

Discovering the right transition metal carbide alloy for electrocatalysis

Brian Rosen (TAU)

Generative AI for biomolecule engineering and autonomous discovery

Ge Liu (UIUC)

3:30-4:00

Break 

4:00-5:00

Technical Session 

Machine Learning Models in Atomistic Simulations: When Can We Trust Their Predictions?

Amir Natan (TAU)

Science-Inspired AI

Heng Ji (UIUC)

5:00-6:30

Poster session

• Autonomous statistically significant electron microscopy for visualizing chemical reactions (Xingzhi Wang, Qian Chen)

• Training Free Guided Flow Matching with Optimal Control (Ge Liu)

• Separating the noise from the noise: Empirical Bayes analysis for vial-to-vial and trial-to-trial variability in ice nucleation assays (Akshay Gurumoorthi, Baron Peters)

• AI Safety for Kids (Yaman Yu, Yang Wang)

• Autonomous Workflows for Knowledge Generation (Brandon Chiang, Paul Kenis)

• Introducing 3D Representation for Dense Volume-to-Volume Translation via Score Fusion (Xiyue Zhu, Volodymyr Kindratenko, DouHoonKwark, RuikeZhu, Kaiwen Hong, YiqiTao,ShiruiLuo, YuduLi, Zhi-Pei Liang)

• Energy Materials Research in the Perry Group (Yong-Yun Hsiau, En Ju Cho, Nicola Perry, Kai-Wei Lan, Alexia Popescu, Sipei Zhang, Xuanze (Ben) Yu, Chieh-Jung (Jimmy) Lu, Vanessa Woo, Hong-Jun Huang)

• Neural Probabilistic Circuits (Weixin Chen, Han Zhao, Simon Yu, Huajie Shao, Lui Sha)

• A Primer on In Vitro Biological Neural Networks (Frithjof Gressmann, Lawrence Rauchwerger, Ashley Chen, Lily Hexuan Xie, Sarah Dowden, Nancy M. Amato)

• Raft: Reward ranked finetuning for generative foundation model alignment (Wei Xiong, Tong Zhang)

• Beyond Correctness: Harmonizing Process and Outcome Rewards through RL Training (Chenlu Ye, Tong Zhang, Zhou Yu, Ziji Zhang, Hao Chen, Narayanan Sadagopan, Jing Huang, Anurag Beniwal)

• Entropy-Regularized Process Reward Model (Pengcheng Wang, Tong Zhang, Hanning Zhang, Shizhe Diao, Yong Lin, Rui Pan, Hanze Dong, Dylan Zhang, Pavlo Molchanov)

• Adaptive Robot Coordination: A Subproblem-Based Approach for Hybrid Multi-Robot Motion Planning (Irving Solis, Nancy M. Amato, James Motes; Mike Qin; Marco Morales)

• Constructing and Reconstructing A “Brain Atlas” for Large Language Models (Chi Han, Heng Ji)

• MSP-SR: multi-stage probabilistic generative super resolution with scarce high-resolution data (Ruike Zhu, Arindam Banerjee, Matthew Charles Weston, Hanwen Zhang)

• MA-LoT: Model-Collaboration Lean-based Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning enhances Formal Theorem Proving (Ruida Wang, Tong Zhang, Rui Pan, Yuxin Li, Jipeng Zhang, Yizhen Jia, Shizhe Diao, Renjie Pi, Junjie Hu)
• Quick Heuristic Validation of Edges in Dynamic Roadmap Graphs (Yulie Arad, Nancy Amato, Stav Ashur)
• Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos without Physical Demonstrations (Shivansh Patel, Shraddhaa Mohan, Asher Mai, Unnat Jain, Svetlana Lazebnik, Yunzhu Li)

9:00-10:30

Technical Session 

From Chatbots to Scientific Discovery with Large Language Models

Volodymyr Kindratenko (UIUC)

Enhancing Safety in LLMs and other Foundation Models

Varun Chandrasekaran (UIUC)

How User Privacy Behavior Shapes Machine Learning Models 

Eran Toch (TAU)

10:30-11:00

Break

11:00-12:00

Technical Session 

Towards Ethical AI: Democratic AI Governance & AI Safety for Youth

Yang Wang (UIUC)

Social AI and its Role in Diagnosing and Treating Autism 

Jim Rehg (UIUC)

12:00-12:45

Lunch

1:00-1:45pm

Visit to Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB) and Mind in Vitro Project Demo*

2:00-3:30pm

Technical Session 

Reinforcement Learning for Foundation Models: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications

Tong Zhang (UIUC)

Implicit Biases of Gradient Descent in Offline System Identification and Optimal Control

Nadav Cohen (TAU)

Neural Probabilistic Circuits: Towards Compositional and Interpretable Predictions through Logical Reasoning

Han Zhao (UIUC)

3:30-4:00

Break 

4:00-5:00

Technical Session 

Learning from End User Data with Shuffled Differential Privacy over Kernel Densities

Tal Wagner (TAU)

Benefits of Structure and Randomness in Deep Learning

Arindam Banerjee (UIUC)

5:00

Workshop Closing