Summer Group Research

Summer 2026 research symposium schedule and paper discussion plan.

Meeting Information

  • Meeting Time: Tuesdays, 10:30-11:30 AM (flex up to 12:00 if needed)
  • Room: SCEN 204
  • Format:
    • Main Presentation: 20 min + 10 min Q&A
    • Paper Review: 20 min

Goal

Practice independent research and engage with foundational and recent work in generative models through presentation, discussion, and critical analysis.

Schedule

May 19

  • Irina Afanasyeva (Graduate) — Main Presentation (20 + 10 Q&A)
  • Bashar Zaqebeh (Graduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes (2013), Kingma and Welling
  • Daniel Kwame Okyere (Graduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Stochastic Backpropagation and Approximate Inference in Deep Generative Models (2014), Rezende, Mohamed, and Wierstra

May 26

  • Sebastian Wilcox (Undergraduate) — Main Presentation (20 + 10 Q&A)
  • Innocent Obed Awidi (Graduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Importance Weighted Autoencoders (2015), Burda, Grosse, and Salakhutdinov
  • Irina Afanasyeva (Graduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Generative Adversarial Nets (2014), Goodfellow et al.

June 2

  • Anjuman Ara Rashid (Graduate) — Main Presentation (20 + 10 Q&A)
  • Soumya Chauhan (Graduate) — Main Presentation (20 + 10 Q&A)
  • Sebastian Wilcox (Undergraduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Wasserstein GAN (WGAN) (2017), Arjovsky, Chintala, and Bottou

June 9

  • Daniel Kwame Okyere (Graduate) — Main Presentation (20 + 10 Q&A)
  • Anjuman Ara Rashid (Graduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Density Estimation using Real NVP (2016), Dinh, Sohl-Dickstein, and Bengio
  • Soumya Chauhan (Undergraduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics (2015), Sohl-Dickstein, Weiss, Maheswaranathan, and Ganguli

June 23

  • Innocent Obed Awidi (Graduate) — Main Presentation (20 + 10 Q&A)
  • Daniel Kwame Okyere (Graduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) (2020), Ho, Jain, and Abbeel
  • Bashar Zaqebeh (Graduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equations (2021), Song, Sohl-Dickstein, Kingma, Kumar, Ermon, and Poole

July 2 (Thursday)

  • Bashar Zaqebeh (Graduate) — Main Presentation (20 + 10 Q&A)
  • Anjuman Ara Rashid (Graduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Variational Diffusion Models (VDM) (2022), Kingma, Salimans, Jozefowicz, Chen, Sutskever, and Ho
  • Innocent Obed Awidi (Graduate) — Paper Review (20 min): Diffusion Models on Graphs (2023), Vignac, Bresson, and Bronstein

Notes

  • No meeting during the week of June 14-20.
  • Meet on Thursday during the week of June 29 to July 3.
  • Graduate students complete two paper reviews each.
  • Sessions emphasize presentation, Q&A, and discussion.