Welcome to the Machine Learning Seminar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign!
- The seminar is part of CS 591 MLR, whose faculty instructors are Arindam Banerjee and Han Zhao. To obtain a passing grade, students are required to participate in at least 75% of the talk. Every recorded question counts as a +5 bonus.
- For general audience, we have a mailing list that you can subscribe to.
Please find below the information of this semester (Spring 2026).
Physical Location: SC 1214
Zoom: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/89518916999?pwd=KYXs0bth89P9w3avQ0a09OtmcgQnTF.1
Channel link: TBD
Time: Friday 2:00-3:15 PM CT
Mailing List: uiuc-ml-reading-group@lists.illinois.edu (To Subscribe)
Student Organizers: Weixin Chen, Yuzheng Hu
Dates | Location | Speaker | Affiliation | Title |
| 02/06/2026 | SC 1214 | Junwei Deng | UIUC | Toward a Transparent and Actionable Data Lifecycle: A Data Attribution Perspective [slides] |
| 02/13/2026 | SC 1214 | Ziqi Zhang | UIUC | Hardware-Rooted Secure LLM System |
| 02/20/2026 | SC 1214 | Yuji Zhang | UIUC | Knowledge is Power, But Power Casts Shadows? [slides] |
| 02/27/2026 | SC 1214 | Tianxin Wei | UIUC | Toward Personal AI Agents: Learning Under Evolving Interactions [slides] |
| 03/06/2026 | Remote | Emanuele Marconato | University of Trento | Symbol Grounding in Neuro-Symbolic AI: A Gentle Introduction to Reasoning Shortcuts [slides] |
| 03/13/2026 | Remote | Jianing Zhu | UT Austin | Surgical Machine Unlearning: Decoupling Targets, Diagnosing Fragility, and Latent Intervention [slides] |
| 03/20/2026 | N/A | N/A | Spring Break | |
| 03/27/2026 | SC 1214 | Kumar Kshitij Patel | Yale FDS/Simons Institute | When do Score-based Data Valuation Methods Work and Why? [slides] |
| 04/03/2026 | Remote | Olawale Salaudeen | MIT | Characterizing When Spurious Correlations and Distribution Shifts Harm Generalization |
| 04/10/2026 | SC 1214 | Mengfan Xu | UMass | Multi-objective and Multi-agent Perspectives on Bandit Learning |
| 04/17/2026 | Remote | Fangzhou Wu | UW Madison | Efficient Capability-Aware LLM Systems: Capability Modeling, Routing, and Load Balancing [slides] |
| 04/24/2026 | Remote | Lifan Yuan | UIUC | From f(x) and g(x) to f(g(x)): LLMs Learn New Skills in RL by Composing Old Ones [slides] |
| 05/01/2026 | SC 1214 | Benjie Wang | UCLA | Bridging the Formalization Gap in Generative AI |
Sites of previous semesters:
In loving memory of Nathanael Assefa, whose bright spirit was taken from us far too soon. We will forever miss him, both as a brilliant leader and a dear friend.