SES Dissertation Defense
Carlo Duffy's SES Dissertation Defense of Essays on Anomaly Detection and Referral Behavior Among Medicare Providers, 14 April 2026 at 10:15am in E18-304.
Understanding and Improving the Safety of Frontier Models
Abstract: (The talk will be self-contained and no background on LLM Safety/Alignment is required.)Â This talk provides a foundational overview of recent efforts in industry and academia to improve the safety of frontier models, along with open challenges. It will cover (1) principal approaches to designing red-teaming attacks, (2) in-model and out-of-model methods for enhancing safety, and (3) if time permits, the challenge of catastrophic forgetting in post-training and approaches to continual learning. Bio:Â Hamed Hassani is currently a senior research scientist…
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Formal Models of Language Generation
Abstract: The emergence of large language models has prompted a surge of interest into theoretical models that might give us insight into both their successes and their shortcomings. We'll give an overview of recent work in this direction, focusing on a surprising line of positive results that shows it is possible to give guarantees for language-generation algorithms even in the absence of any probabilistic assumptions, in a framework known as "language generation in the limit". These results suggest interesting notions…



