ML-Talk am 17.09.2025: Prof. Stephan Mandt (University of California, Irvine), "Scientific Inference with Diffusion Generative Models"
- Event Location: RPTU in Kaiserslautern, Gebäude 48, Raum 208
Event Date: 17.09.2025
Contact Person: Prof. Dr. Marius Kloft
The Machine Learning Group of Prof. Marius Kloft
at the Department of Computer Science Department at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau
cordially invites you to a talk on
"Scientific Inference with Diffusion Generative Models"
by Prof. Stephan Mandt (University of California, Irvine)
on
Wednesday, September 17th 2025 at 15:30 in Room 48/208
Abstract:
Diffusion models have transformed generative modeling in various domains such as vision and language.
But can they serve as tools for scientific inference? In this talk, Stephan Mandt presents
a perspective that reframes diffusion models as Bayesian solvers for scientific inverse problems
- involving a noisy measurement process - with applications ranging from climate modeling to astrophysical imaging.
Scientific use cases demand more than photorealism - they require calibrated uncertainty, distributional fidelity,
efficient conditional sampling, and the ability to model heavy-tailed data.
He'll highlight four recent advances developed to meet these needs:
1. Variational Control, an improved framework for conditional generation in pretrained diffusion models (ICML '25)
2. Heavy-Tailed Diffusion Models, for enabling accurate modeling of sparse and extreme-valued scientific data (ICLR '25)
3. Conjugate Integrators, for enabling fast conditional sampling without retraining (NeurIPS '24)
4. Generative Uncertainty for Diffusion Models, for assessing and exploiting epistemic uncertainties in data generation tasks (UAI '25)
Bio:
Stephan Mandt is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at the University of California, Irvine.
His research contributes to the foundations and applications of generative AI, with a focus on
generative modeling of 2D, 3D, and sequential data, compression, resource-efficient learning, inference algorithms, and AI-driven scientific discovery.
He is a Chan Zuckerberg Investigator and AI Resident and has received the NSF CAREER Award, the UCI ICS Mid-Career Excellence in Research Award, and a Kavli Fellowship.
Before UCI, he led the machine learning group at Disney Research and held postdoctoral positions at Princeton and Columbia.
Stephan frequently serves as a Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS, ICML, and ICLR and was most recently Program Chair for AISTATS 2024 and General Chair for AISTATS 2025.
This is a scientific lecture as part of the Computer Science Colloquium, which will be held in English.
The KI-Allianz Rheinland-Pfalz supported the organization of the event.
-- Steffen Reithermann
Prof. Stephan Mandt - University of California, Irvine (UCI)