Wednesday / Student Seminar
April 1 / 12:00 PM
Mudd 3514
Speaker: Robin Luo
Title: Softmax1 Is All You Need
Abstract: Foundation models have achieved strong performance across a wide range of domains, but their growing scale also raises important challenges in efficiency, robustness, and safety. In this talk, I will present recent work centered on Softmax1, a simple yet effective modification that improves foundation models by enabling more efficient reasoning, reducing outlier behavior, and enhancing robustness under quantization and safety alignment settings. I will discuss both the core intuition behind this approach and its broader implications for building trustworthy and efficient foundation models.
Bio: Robin (Haozheng) Luo is a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at Northwestern University and a DAAD AINeT Research Fellow and Adobe Research Fellow. His research focuses on trustworthy and efficient foundation models, including reasoning efficiency, quantization-robust architectures, and safety alignment, with publications at top-tier conferences such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, and USENIX Security.
Wynante R Charles
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