The Distinguished Lecture Series of the School of Computing and Data Science (CDS), invites distinguished scholars from across the globe to share their expertise and insights in the areas of computer science, data science, artificial intelligence, and statistics.

Our 4th Distinguished Lecture, titled “Recent Results on Multimodal Foundation Models”, will be presented by Professor Ming-Hsuan Yang, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Merced.

Speaker:

Professor Ming-Hsuan Yang, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California at Merced

Date:

21 May, 2025 (Wednesday)

Time:

10:30 am – 11:30 am

Venue:

CB-A, G/F, Chow Yei Ching Building, Main Campus, The University of Hong Kong

Abstract:
Recent advances in vision and language models have significantly improved visual understanding and generation tasks. In this talk, he will present their latest research on designing effective tokenizers for transformers and their efforts to adapt frozen large language models for diverse vision tasks. These tasks include visual classification, video-text retrieval, visual captioning, visual question answering, visual grounding, video generation, stylization, outpainting, and video-to-audio conversion. If time permits, he will also discuss their recent findings on learning diffusion models and dynamic 3D vision.

Biography:

Ming-Hsuan Yang is a Professor at the University of California, Merced, and a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He received numerous awards, including the Google Faculty Award 2009, NSF CAREER Award 2012, and Nvidia Pioneer Research Award 2017 and 2018, and SONY Faculty Award 2025. He received the Best Paper Honorable Mention at UIST 2017, CVPR 2018, and ACCV 2018, the Longuet-Higgins Prize (Test of Time Paper) at CVPR 2023, Best Paper at ICML 2024, and Test-of-Time award from WACV 2025. Yang is an Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) and an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV).  He is a Fellow of IEEE, ACM, and AAAI.

All are welcome to attend.