Theory, Practice, and Security of Foundation Models (Boninchi)

from Monday, 29 September 2025 (08:05) to Friday, 3 October 2025 (20:05)
Villa Boninchi

        : Sessions
    /     : Talks
        : Breaks
29 Sep 2025
30 Sep 2025
1 Oct 2025
2 Oct 2025
3 Oct 2025
AM
09:00 Welcome & intro - Slava Voloshynovskiy (UniGE)   ()
09:30 Large Models in Low Precision: Power, Limits and Scaling Laws - Dan Alistarh ( ISTA, Austria)   ()
10:40 --- Coffee break ☕️🫖🥐 ---
11:00 Short-term attention enables long term memorization & Stochastic activations - Hervé Jégou (META)   ()
09:00 --- ☕️ 🫖 🥐 ---
09:30 The Watermark Awakens - Pierre Fernandez (Meta, France)   ()
10:40 --- ☕️ 🫖 ---
11:00 The power of small language models - Pavlo Molchanov (NVIDIA, USA)   ()
10:45 Boat trip to Yvoire   ()
09:00 --- ☕️🫖🥐 ---
09:30 Generative World Models for Sample-Efficient Reinforcement Learning - Eloi Alonso Vincent Micheli   ()
10:40 --- ☕️🫖 ---
11:00 Energy-Based Transformers and the Future of Scaling - Alexi Gladstone (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign/META, the USA)   ()
09:00 --- ☕️🫖🥐 ---
09:30 DINOv3 - Federico Baldassarre (Meta, France)   ()
10:30 How perception got solved (albeit unsatisfyingly) - Lucas Beyer Xiaohua Zhaị   ()
11:30 --- ☕️🫖 ---
11:45 Reasoning by thinking compositionally - Emmanuel Abbe (EPFL / Apple, CH)   ()
PM
12:10 --- Lunch ---
13:10 AI through the Information-Theoretic lens - Slava Voloshynovskiy (UniGE)   ()
14:10 --- Coffee break☕️🫖 ---
14:30 TwinTURBO: Semi-Supervised Fine-Tuning of Foundation Models via Mutual Information Decompositions - Quetant Guillaume (UNIGE)   ()
15:00 Llama4 in 4 bits - Brian Pulfer (University of Geneva)   ()
15:30 --- Coffee break☕️🫖 ---
15:50 Diffusion LM and Compression - Pavlo Molchanov (NVIDIA, USA)   ()
17:00 --- Apero on Lake Board: discussions/networking/free time ---
18:00
Transfer to Social Event (until 18:30) ()
18:30 --- Dinner ---
12:10 --- Lunch ---
13:40 Handcrafted vs. Learned: A Comparative Evaluation of Digital Watermarking Techniques - Vitaliy Kinakh   ()
14:10 Attacking and Defending Vision Foundation Models - Yury Belousov   ()
14:40 --- ☕️ 🫖 ---
15:00 TBD - Brian Pulfer (University of Geneva)   ()
15:30 --- ☕️ 🫖 ---
15:50 TBD - Seyed Mohsen Moosavi-Dezfooli (Apple, CH)   ()
17:00 --- ☕️ 🫖 ---
17:20 Round table - industrial perspective of model security and privacy   ()
12:30 --- Lunch & Discussion ---
16:45 Boat trip -Return to Geneva   ()
12:10 --- Lunch ---
13:40 Mini-Bang Detection and Interpretation: Benchmarking Reasoning on Emergent and Open-Ended Dynamics - Andrey Ustuzanin (Constructor University, Germany)   ()
14:30 --- ☕️🫖 ---
14:50 Improving mid-resource language performance in open LLMs - Hanna Yukhymenko (Hugging Face, CH)   ()
15:40 --- ☕️🫖 ---
16:00 TBD - Yury Belousov   ()
16:30 Binary Diffusion Probabilistic Model - Vitaliy Kinakh   ()
17:00 Discussion & Brainstorm & Free time   ()
12:45 --- Lunch ---
14:00 World Models for Code - Taco Cohen (Meta, the UK)   ()
15:00 --- ☕️🫖 ---
15:20 The free transformer - François Fleuret (University of Geneva /Meta, CH/France)   ()
16:20 --- ☕️🫖 ---
16:40 Vision-language models: in-context learning and adaptation for radio-astronomy - Mariia Drozdova (Universite de Geneve (CH))   ()
17:10 Radio Astronomy in the Era of Large Models - Erica Lastufka (University of Geneva, CH)   ()
17:40 Summary/Conclusion/Outlook - Slava Voloshynovskiy (UniGE)   ()
18:05 --- Afterparty by subscription ---