Block Seminar Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing (Spring 2026)

Deep learning is the predominant machine learning paradigm in natural language processing (NLP). This approach not only gave huge performance improvements across a large variety of natural language processing tasks.

This spring, we will look into transformer language models and how they can integrate graph information.

Lecturer:  Dietrich Klakow

Location:  t.d.b

Time: block course in the spring break 2026 however preparations start earlier. Here the specific time line

Closing topic doodle: tbd
Kick-Off: tbd
One page outline: tbd
Draft presentation: tbd

Practice talks and final talks will be during the spring break. Time/date will be decided during the kick-off.

Application for participation:  see CS seminar system (for CS; DSAI, VC, ES, …), for CoLI,LST, LCT use LSF to apply.

HISPOS registration deadline: tbd

Grading (tentative):

  • 5% one page talk outline
  • 10% draft presentation
  • 10% practice talk
  • 25% own experiments and coding
  • 10% report on coding task
  • 35% final talk
  • 5% contributions to discussion during final talk of fellow participants

List of Topics (tentative):

  1. Overtrained Language Models Are Harder to Fine-Tune
  2. LoRA-One: One-Step Full Gradient Could Suffice for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models, Provably and Efficiently
  3. Roll the dice & look before you leap: Going beyond the creative limits of next-token prediction
  4. LLM-SRBench: A New Benchmark for Scientific Equation Discovery with Large Language Models
  5. The dark side of the forces: assessing non-conservative force models for atomistic machine learning
  6. CFP-Gen: Combinatorial Functional Protein Generation via Diffusion Language Models
  7. Scaling Laws for Upcycling Mixture-of-Experts Language Models#
  8. Understanding and Mitigating Memorization in Generative Models via Sharpness of Probability Landscapes
  9. Recipe for a General, Powerful, Scalable Graph Transformer