BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Competence\, Pain and the Geometry of Intelligence: Three Perspect
 ives on Learning and Representation - Prof Milica Gasic (Heinrich Heine Un
 iversity Düsseldorf)
DTSTART:20260127T120000Z
DTEND:20260127T130000Z
UID:TALK242710@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Suchir Salhan
DESCRIPTION:Recent progress in language models and artificial agents has r
 enewed foundational questions about how intelligence is learned\, structur
 ed and represented. In this omnibus talk\, I present three complementary p
 erspectives on these questions. First\, I discuss ontology creation using 
 large language models\, grounded in the notion of competence: what it mean
 s for a model to meaningfully possess and organise knowledge beyond surfac
 e-level performance. Second\, I explore how inspiration from human pain an
 d aversive signals can inform more efficient reinforcement learning\, view
 ing pain as a mechanism for shaping learning dynamics rather than merely o
 ptimising reward. Third\, I examine the geometry and dimensionality of rep
 resentation spaces in large language models and what these structures reve
 al about overfitting\, convergence\, and ultimately grokking. Though very 
 different in focus\, these perspectives jointly contribute to a deeper und
 erstanding of the nature of unsupervised learning.\n\nProf. Dr. Milica Ga
 šić is a professor in Dialog Systems and Machine Learning at Heinrich He
 ine University\, Düsseldorf\, Germany. Prior to her current appointment s
 he was a group leader in Saarland University and\, before that\, a lecture
 r at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on fundamental ques
 tions of human-computer dialogue modelling and lie in the intersection of 
 Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. She is a recipient of th
 e European Research Council Starting Grant\, the Alexander von Humboldt So
 fja Kovalevskaja Award and the Lamarr Fellowship. Prof. Gašić served as 
 the vice-president of SIGDIAL 2021-2024. She is a member of the Internatio
 nal Scientific Advisory Board of DFKI\, a member of ACL\, a member of ELLI
 S and a senior member of IEEE. 
LOCATION:SS03 Hybrid (In-Person + Online). Here is the Google Meet Link: h
 ttps://meet.google.com/cru-hcuo-rhu
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR