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May 21, 2026
This seminar covers:
• The evolution from language models to native multimodal systems
• Focus on the architectural and training principles that transfer from the LLM paradigm
• Challenges introduced by multimodal learning
• The building blocks of modern multimodal LLMs, including modality representations, autoregressive modeling, and reasoning capabilities inherited from strong language models
• Emerging directions in multimodal architecture design, including sparsity and modality specialization
Follow along with the seminar schedule. Visit: https://web.stanford.edu/class/cs25/
Guest Speaker: Victoria Lin (Thinking Machines)
Instructors:
• Steven Feng, Stanford Computer Science PhD student and NSERC PGS-D scholar
• Karan P. Singh, Electrical Engineering PhD student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow in the Stanford Translational AI Lab
• Michael C. Frank, Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor of Human Biology Director, Symbolic Systems Program
• Christopher Manning, Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning, Professor of Linguistics and of Computer Science, Co-Founder and Senior Fellow of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)