Strengthening international research in IA with an Alliance Visiting Professorship

Professor Micah Goldblum’s research at Columbia University concentrates on Deep Learning, with a focus on large-scale AI systems and the scientific understanding of their mechanisms. After delivering two guest lectures in École Polytechnique’s Data Science and AI for Business X-HEC last semester, Micah Goldblum visited École Polytechnique for four weeks in May to collaborate on two research projects with El Mahdi El Mhamdi, Professor at École Polytechnique. 

Before joining Columbia, Micah Goldblum worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Yann LeCun and Andrew Gordon Wilson at New York University (NYU) on a broad range of subjects, ranging from generalization theory to uncertainty estimation to training under class imbalance. Micah Goldblum “switched to AI in a very short time” after his PhD in mathematics remains still very drawn to his original discipline. When asked what he particularly appreciates about l’X, he mentions, without any hesitation, “École Polytechnique’s strong emphasis on fundamentals and mathematical rigor”.

International research projects on AI Safety and optimization for LLMs

At École Polytechnique, Professor El Mahdi El Mhamdi and Micah Goldblum have started collaborating on two research projects - one on AI Safety and the other on training algorithms for LLMs - together with research colleagues at the Center for Applied Mathematics (CMAP*). “The first project focuses on methods to optimize the use of LLM training data, as the highest quality data becomes scarce relative to growing computational resources”, states Micah Goldblum. He explains that the other project is on optimization for LLMs: “Training language models is hard because of instability, and we are trying to understand why such instability emerges and to develop stable training algorithms”, he elaborates.

Committed to strengthening international research collaboration and involving also other scientists both in both the US and France, Micah Goldblum and El Mahdi El Mhamdi, have opened their research projects to several PhD students. Two PhD students from Columbia joined l’X during the final week of Professor Goldblum’s visit in order to meet and connect with Professor El Mhamdi’s team on campus.

Professor Goldblum’s experience as researcher in the United States enables him to notice - not only common scientific practices and research focuses - but also differences in research culture, and namely one major difference. “In France, it is typical to spend many years working on the same topic, which has the advantage of allowing you to develop deep expertise and spend a long time thinking about a problem. On the other hand, sometimes an area that was exciting when you started working on it becomes less important over time. In the US, we typically switch research directions faster”, he observes, and adds that there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, depending on the field.

With regard to the current research in the field of AI, Micah Goldblum considers that many researchers “act under the assumption that the current form of LLMs is permanent”. Yet, he sees “many places where these models are highly suboptimal, for example their architectures, how they are trained, and the fusion of text and other modalities”, and considers that “there’s a whole world outside of language models to work on that a lot of young researchers overlook”.

Alliance Visiting Professorships

To strengthen the links between the partner institutions and to establish long-term collaborations on potential projects, the international Alliance program, including Columbia University, École Polytechnique, Sciences Po, and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, provides each year up to six faculty members with the possibility to participate in transatlantic faculty exchanges. 

Faculty members can spend a few weeks or an entire semester as Visiting professors at the partner institution, where they will give public lectures, participate in seminars, and continue to work on their research projects. The Alliance Visiting Professorship benefits from funding from the Fondation de l'École polytechnique as part of its campaign “Servir la science” (in English, “In the service of science”).

*CMAP: a joint research unit CNRS, École Polytechnique - Institut Polytechnique de Paris