AI Seminar - Spring 2026

The UNT Artificial Intelligence (AI) seminar aims to cover a broad variety of AI topics, such as computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, AI fairness & ethics, multimodal learning, etc. The goal is to facilitate research discussion and collaboration in AI.

Time: Unless otherwise noted, the events are on Wednesdays at 10:30am-11:30am (every week).

Room: Unless otherwise noted, we will meet at Discover Park F219 in person (see the schedule on Google sheet for each event).

Who can attend? All students (PhD/MS/Undergraduate/K-12 students) who are interested in AI are welcome to attend our seminar.

Schedule

KOSMOS-2: Grounding Multimodal Large Language Models to the World
Speaker: Thanh Le, PhD student
Time: 1/14/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

Visual Instruction Tuning
Speaker: Md Abdullah Al Forhad, PhD student
Time: 1/21/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

See What You Are Told: Visual Attention Sink in Large Multimodal Models
Speaker: Son Phan, PhD student
Time: 2/4/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model
Speaker: Shaohua Dong, PhD student
Time: 2/11/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

ORPO: Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Model
Speaker: Xiaoqiong Liu, PhD student
Time: 2/18/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

Group Sequence Policy Optimization
Speaker: Lyuzhou Ye, PhD student
Time: 2/25/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

DeepEyes: Incentivizing “Thinking with Images” via Reinforcement Learning
Speaker: Chenyang Yu, PhD student
Time: 3/4/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

Medusa: Simple LLM Inference Acceleration Framework with Multiple Decoding Heads
Speaker: Dawei Gao, PhD student
Time: 3/18/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

Better & Faster Large Language Models via Multi-token Prediction
Speaker: Mingchen Li, PhD student
Time: 3/25/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

Gated Attention for Large Language Models: Non-linearity, Sparsity, and Attention-Sink-Free
Speaker: Hanzhi Zhang, PhD student
Time: 4/1/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

DS-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models - Part 1
Speaker: Sumera Anjum, PhD student
Time: 4/8/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

DS-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models - Part 2
Speaker: Minghao Li, PhD student
Time: 4/15/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

CLAP4CLIP: Continual Learning with Probabilistic Finetuning for Vision-Language Models
Speaker: Bing Fan, PhD student
Time: 4/22/2026 | 10:30 am - 11:30 am
Room: F219, Discovery Park, UNT

Previous AI Seminar