DEEC Faculty Members Participate in the 16th Edition of the Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS)
Between 20 and 25 July, Técnico hosted the 16th edition of the Lisbon Machine Learning School (LxMLS). This initiative featured a range of activities, including lectures and hands-on sessions, in the fields of machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP). The event brought together students, researchers, and industry professionals and featured the participation of Bruno Martins, Isabel Trancoso (researchers at INESC-ID), Mário Figueiredo and André Martins (researchers at the Instituto de Telecomunicações), and Zita Marinho (Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica). Throughout the six days, participants had the opportunity to learn about and discuss current research and the future of technology in areas such as neural networks, sequential models, transformers, causality, and multimodal models.
Following the welcome ceremony for participants and a brief presentation of the event by Bruno Martins, the session Learning with Linear Models, led by Mário Figueiredo, took place. The professor addressed the foundations of machine learning, particularly supervised linear models.
André Martins participated in the session Transformers and Large Pretrained Models, where he discussed research in the field of transformers, a specific neural network architecture designed to efficiently learn relationships in sequential data, such as text, and its connection to the development of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and DeepSeek. Afterwards, Zita Marinho presented the session Reinforcement Learning in the Era of LLMs, where she introduced some of the systems used in reinforcement learning, a technique in which a model learns through interaction with an environment, receiving rewards or penalties according to its actions.
The summer school also featured the discussion panel From Tokens to Thoughts: The Changing Roles of Language and Learning, moderated by Isabel Trancoso, with the participation of Mário Figueiredo.
On the final day, Bruno Martins presented the session Vision and Language, together with Desmond Elliott, where topics such as learning and the linguistic capabilities of LLMs were discussed. All presentations are available on the official LxMLS website.
LxMLS is organised annually by Técnico in collaboration with INESC-ID, Instituto de Telecomunicações, the ELLIS Unit for Learning and Intelligent Systems (LUMLIS), Zendesk, and IBM Research.
Photography: Técnico