October : Deep Agents, World Models and REFRAG
Details
We return this month with an evening to cover a range of topics at the frontier of AI.
FOOD UPDATE : Google has told us that there WILL BE pizza at the event
ALSO: Sign-ups are on MeetUp this time! Registration here should be FREE - if MeetUp requires you to sign up for a subscription somehow, let us know! (We haven't heard of this happening for registrations via their mobile app, FWIW).
Talks:
"Neural Assets and World Models" - Martin Andrews
In his talk, Martin will outline some of the more modern methods for training image generation models - and then move on to discussing World Models such as GENIE 3. He'll also show a tiny, local world model demo (fingers-crossed!).
"REFRAG: Rethinking RAG based Decoding" - Xiaoqiang Lin
Xiaoqiang, currently doing his PhD at NUS, recently released a research paper "REFRAG" as part of his work at MSL. We're fortunate to be able to host his lightning talk about this exciting work.
"Building DeepAgents" - Sam Witteveen
In this talk, Sam will look at Deep Agents, their core components and ways to make them run effectively for long-time horizon tasks and trajectories. Sam will break down the strategies used and show some methods that you can be used to build them in different agentic frameworks.
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Talks will start at 7:10pm and end at around 8:45pm, at which point people normally come up to the front for a bit of a chat with each other, and the speakers.
As always, we're actively looking for more speakers - both '30 minutes long-form', and lightning talks. For the lightning talks, we welcome folks to come and talk about something cool they've done with keras, PyTorch, JAX and/or Deep Learning for 5-10mins (so, if you have slides, then #max=10). We believe that the key ingredient for the success of a Lightning Talk is simply the cool/interesting factor. It doesn't matter whether you're an expert or an enthusiastic beginner: Given the responses we have had to previous talks, we're sure there are lots of people who would love to hear what you've been playing with. If you're interested in talking, please just introduce yourself to Martin at one of the events.