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UID:0-1777@hmc.edu
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260403T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20260403T121500
DTSTAMP:20260330T205355Z
URL:https://www.hmc.edu/calendar/events/cs-colloquium-a-theoretical-cs-len
 s-on-language-modeling-clayton-sanford/
SUMMARY:CS Colloquium: “A Theoretical CS Lens on Language Modeling\,” C
 layton Sanford
DESCRIPTION:Multi-layer transformer models form the backbone of modern deep
  learning\, yet little mathematical work details their benefits and defici
 encies as compared with other architectures. This makes it difficult to an
 swer practical and fundamental questions about the transformer architectur
 e: What powers increase with model depth? Can alternative architectures im
 prove efficiency without sacrificing expressivity? Clayton Sanford present
 s a communication-based theoretical framework for understanding the repres
 entational capabilities and limitations of multi-layer transformers. These
  results imply that parallelizability is a key property of the standard tr
 ansformer that other architectures cannot easily replicate. Stanford conte
 xtualizes these results within the broader conversation about the challeng
 es of developing a principled theory of neural networks and share opinions
  on how theoretical computer science can remain relevant to their study.\n
 Speaker\nClayton Sanford is a senior research scientist at Google\, where 
 he works on distillation and pretraining for Gemini. He has a PhD in compu
 ter science from Columbia University and studied machine learning theory w
 ith advisors Rocco Servedio and Daniel Hsu. His research focuses on the th
 eoretical capabilities of neural architectures\, particularly transformers
 .
CATEGORIES:Faculty,Staff,Students
LOCATION:Shanahan Center\, 320 E. Foothill Blvd.\, Claremont\, CA\, 91711\,
  United States
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DTSTART:20260308T030000
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