From Foundations and Large Language Models to Multimodal Reasoning and Trustworthy AI
Jointly hosted by Information Retrieval & Intelligent Semantics Lab and Center of Intelligence Robotics, IIIT Allahabad in conjunction with ACM India Council
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), powered by large language models, foundation models, and multimodal architectures, is transforming applications such as conversational AI, text summarization, question answering, document understanding, and scientific discovery. However, current generative models can still struggle with systematic reasoning, factual grounding, hallucination, explainability, robustness, and safety.
The ACM India Winter School on “Multimodal and Reasoning-Aware Generative AI” aims to address these challenges through a progressive combination of foundational concepts, expert lectures, and hands-on learning. The programme covers modern paradigms including transformers and LLMs, instruction learning, Chain-of-Thought and structured prompting, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), neuro-symbolic reasoning, hallucination and faithfulness evaluation, vision-language models, multimodal grounding, and multisource data fusion.
The school further emphasizes responsible and trustworthy GenAI, covering bias, fairness, safety, alignment, and deployment considerations. Hands-on experiments and group mini-projects will enable participants to translate theoretical concepts into practical AI systems and develop a foundation for further research and innovation in Generative AI.
Introduce transformers, pretraining objectives, instruction tuning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT), and alignment.
Master Chain-of-Thought (CoT), structured prompting, RAG, and neuro-symbolic/program-aided approaches.
Gain hands-on training building vision-language models, cross-modal pipelines, and multimodal RAG.
Detect hallucinations, benchmark reasoning faithfulness, evaluate bias, safety, and responsible AI alignment.
16 interactive lab sessions with real-world LLM frameworks, vector databases, and multimodal models.
Formulate research problems, implement novel solutions in groups, and present findings before an expert panel.
IIIT Allahabad is an Institute of National Importance established by the Government of India. It represents a premier center of excellence in Information Technology and allied domains, equipped with state-of-the-art AI computing labs and residential infrastructure.
Participants will have access to high-performance computing clusters and high-speed network access for hands-on sessions throughout the 10 days.
