ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Perry Lam – Neural networks are known to be over-parametrised and sparse models have been shown to perform as well as dense models over a range of image and language processing tasks. However, while compact representations and model compression methods have been applied to speech tasks, sparsification techniques have rarely been used on text-to-speech (TTS) models. We seek to characterise the impact of selected sparse techniques on the performance and model complexity.

ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Wei Lin – Critical Information Infrastructures (CII) encompass the fundamental computer systems that ensure the continuous delivery of essential services, including sectors such as energy, water, and infocomm. Safeguarding these systems against both physical and cyber threats is crucial to maintaining the continuity and resilience of the services they support.

ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Duo Peng – In this paper, we investigate Diffusion-Based Domain Adaptation, leveraging emerging
diffusion models to address domain adaptation tasks. The motivation behind our research stems from the powerful distribution transformation capabilities of diffusion models, which we aim to harness to help AI models adapt to new data distributions.

ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Zhu Lanyun – Semantic segmentation is a fundamental and important task in computer vision, which aims to classify each pixel in an image. The rapid development of deep learning has significantly advanced semantic segmentation and improved the accuracy, promoting its application in fields with high accuracy requirements for pixel-level prediction, such as autonomous driving and medical diagnosis. Current works for semantic segmentation are typically based on a standard setup that all data is accessible beforehand and can be learned simultaneously.

ISTD PhD Oral Defense Seminar by Haoran Li – Language models are critical to the advancement of natural language processing and general artificial intelligence. In this thesis, we aim to address the limitations of language models, particularly focusing on the exposure bias in Autoregressive (AR) models and the label bias in Non-Autoregressive (NAR) models.

ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Sai Sathiesh Rajan – This dissertation serves to remind us of the importance of thoroughly testing machine learning models before deploying them as they can cause societal, economical and reputational damage.

ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Jan Melechovsky – In the modern era, new technology is opening opportunities to help various groups of people around the world. In this thesis, deep learning and audio processing is utilized to target the needs of and develop specific applications for patients with progressive neurological diseases, speakers of non-native English accents, and amateur and leisure musicians and music enjoyers.

Congratulations to PhD student Hee Ming Shan for obtaining SDSC Dissertion Research Fellowship 2023

ISTD PhD Oral Defence Seminar by Zeng Guangtao – Language models are foundational to modern artificial intelligence, but their development is often constrained by challenges in efficiency, controllability, and reasoning. In this thesis, we aim to address these limitations by introducing advanced paradigms at both the pre-training and post-training stages.

ISTD PhD Oral Defense Seminar by Li Xu – In the ever-evolving field of artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning has emerged as a pivotal technique driving remarkable advancements across various domains. Among its many branches, multi-modal learning stands out as a particularly significant approach, which involves integrating and processing information from multiple modalities of data, such as visual content and language information, to enhance the capabilities of AI systems.