Frontiers in Foundation Models

Course Description: This seminar (Frontiers in Foundation Models) explores the frontier of Large Language Models (LLMs) and next-generation multimodal foundation models. We move beyond standard autoregressive language modeling to study how modern systems integrate text, vision, video, code, and action to enable grounded reasoning and real-world decision making. Topics include multimodal reasoning and evaluation, vision representation learning and segmentation, video generation, foundation models for robotics, and action-centric representation learning. We also cover emerging paradigms such as hierarchical and latent reasoning, diffusion-based language modeling, reinforcement learning for reasoning, and agentic workflows. Throughout the course, we emphasize both mechanistic understanding and practical safety alignment, connecting recent advances in interpretability, test-time compute scaling, and robust evaluation to hands-on paper presentations and open-ended research projects.

Grading & Logistics

Schedule (Spring 2026)