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Opening Remarks - Young Professional Symposium

Invited Talk: Soumith Chintala

Extreme PyTorch: Inside the Most Demanding ML Workloads—and the Open Challenges in Building AI Agents to Democratize Them

In this talk, we’ll explore how cutting-edge users are pushing PyTorch to its limits—from planetary-scale training on interactive supercomputers to ultra-efficient, real-time inference on exotic hardware. These power users give us a unique window into today’s most demanding ML systems challenges. We’ll also examine a bold idea that's on top of everyone's mind at this conference: using AI agents to automate a big chunk of work that these cutting-edge users currently do. This vision is far from realized. We’ll outline the open challenges in building such agents, and share concrete opportunities for open collaboration toward making SysML AI agents a reality.

 

Soumith Chintala is a Scientist-Engineer focused on AI and Robotics, leading influential AI work such as PyTorch, DCGAN and Torch-7; work which is used by several top institutions including NASA, Meta, Google, Tesla, Microsoft, Disney, Genentech, and numerous other Fortune-500 companies and in the curriculum of top-ranked universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and MIT. He currently leads PyTorch and other AI projects at Meta, is a Visiting Professor at New York University, and maintains advisory roles at various institutions.

Invited Talk: Tim Dettmers

Lessons Learned from Successful PhD Students

This talk is for young PhD students and would be PhD students to help them understand how to have a satisfying and successful PhD in Machine Learning Systems. While it draws on my own experience in my PhD, creating such things as bitsandbytes and developing QLoRA, I will mainly draw on research about academic success and general patterns that I saw in successful PhD students to provide perspective. Key questions I will talk about: What is my research style? What should I work on? How should I work on it? How do I get the resources that I need for my work? How do I stay motivated?

Invited Talk: Wei-Lin Chiang

LMArena: An Open Platform for Crowdsourced AI benchmarks

Recent advance in AI has unlocked new capabilities and applications; however, its evaluation still poses significant challenges. We introduce LMArena, an open platform for evaluating AI based on human preferences. Our methodology employs a pairwise comparison approach and leverages input from a global user base through crowdsourcing. The platform has been operational for over two years, collecting ~3 million community votes. LMArena has emerged as one of the most popular LLM leaderboards, widely referenced by leading LLM developers and companies. Our website is publicly available at https://lmarena.ai

Invited Talk: Simran Arora

Designing Models from the Hardware Up

This talk presents systems-level techniques for designing language models that are both high quality and highly efficient. I’ll introduce ThunderKittens, a GPU programming library that simplifies the development of hardware-friendly models, and show how it enabled BASED—an attention-free architecture built from simple, throughput-oriented components. These innovations made it possible to train state-of-the-art 8B–405B parameter attention-free models on academic resources and have influenced emerging approaches across research, industry, and open-source.

Invited Talk: Beidi Chen

YPS - Talk by Beidi Chen