If you are here to seek "TL;DR"...

• Question: what should I read, if I just want to have a very quick glance at what VITA is currently digging on?
• Short Answer: we pick five papers that represent our recent flavors as "chef's choice". The list will change over time: [Heavy-Hitter Oracle, NeurIPS 2023], [Essential Sparsity, NeurIPS 2023] , [NeuralLift-360, CVPR 2023] , [Learning to Grow LLMs, ICLR 2023], [Learning to Optimize, JMLR 2022]
• Long Answer: Please refer to our (still brief) Research Agenda
• Follow VITA on Twitter! Since April 2023, several VITA students volunteer to run a group Twitter (opinions on students' own): Follow @VITAGroupUT

[Nov. 2023]

• 1 IEEE Trans. CAS-II (neuro-symbolic HW-SW co-design) accepted
• 4 CPAL'24 (Block sparse training + sparsity in material science + GAN micromotion + WS-iFSD) accepted

[Oct. 2023]

• 1 IEEE Trans. PAMI (understanding NAS from DL theory) accepted
• 1 3DV'24 (few-shot 6D pose) accepted
• Our group co-organized the ICCV 2023 Workshop on Computer Vision for Automated Medical Diagnosis (CVAMD)

[Sep. 2023]

• 7 NeurIPS'23 (Essential sparsity + LLM heavy-hitter oracle + pruning topology + graph MoE + in-context diffusion + patch diffusion + channel-level DST) accepted
• VITA Postdoc Shiwei Liu is selected to receive the prestigious Newton International Fellowship from the British Academy and the Royal Society

[Aug. 2023]

• VITA welcomes four new Ph.D. students: Wes Robbins, Seo Young Lee, Zehao Zhu, and Runjin Chen
• 1 Nature Communications (medical imaging fairness) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. Image Processing (adaptive deblurring) accepted

[Jul. 2023]

• 8 ICCV'23 (GNT-MOVE + turbulence diffusion + vision HGNN + AdaMV-MoE + StegaNeRF + versatile diffusion + robust MoE + Text2Video-Zero) accepted
• 1 QCE'23 (quantum sparse training) accepted
• 2 ICCAD'23 (Edge-MoE + INR dataflow) accepted
• 1 invited paper at IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin (graph contrastive learning)
• VITA Ph.D. students Yifan Jiang and Greg Holste are selected to receive two UT Graduate Dean’s Prestigious Fellowships

[Jun. 2023]

• VITA Ph.D. student Ajay Jaiswal is selected to receive the Inaugural Amazon Science Research Fellowship (by the UT-Amazon Hub)
• VITA Ph.D. student Tianlong Chen is selected to receive the AdvML Rising Star Award 2023
• 1 European Heart Journal (clinical SSL for echocardiography; IF = 35.855) accepted [Press]
• 1 TMLR (deep image prior parameterization) accepted
• 1 Information Fusion (transformer for traffic prediction) accepted
• Our group co-organized the CVPR 2023 Workshop and Prize Challenge: Bridging the Gap between Computational Photography and Visual Recognition (UG2+)
• Our group co-organized the ICASSP 2023 Short Course on Learning Nonlinear and Deep Low-Dimensional Representations from High-Dimensional Data: From Theory to Practice
• Our group co-organized the ICASSP 2023 Tutorial on Bilevel Optimization for Machine Learning: Theory, Algorithms and Applications
• Our group co-organized the ICASSP 2023 Special Session on Unsupervised Deep Learning of Image Priors for Inverse Problems

[May. 2023]

• VITA's Summer 2023 (big) squad of Ph.D. students graduated:
  • Dr. Tianlong Chen will join CS@UNC Chapel Hill as an Assistant Professor (starting from Fall 2024), after another year of postdoc at MIT/Harvard
  • Dr. Wuyang Chen will join CS@Simon Fraser as an Assistant Professor (starting from Fall 2024), after another year of postdoc at UC Berkeley
  • Dr. Junru Wu joins Google Research, New York as a Research Engineer
  • Dr. Haotao Wang joins Qualcomm AI Research, San Diego as a Research Scientist
  • Dr. Ziyu Jiang joins NEC Labs America, CA as a Research Scientist
  • Dr. Wenqing Zheng joins Amazon, CA as a Senior Applied Scientist
  • Dr. Jiayi Shen joins Amazon, CA as an Applied Scientist
  • Dr. Yan Han joins LinkedIn, CA as a Research Scientist
  Congratulations to ALL!
• Announce the Conference on Parsimony and Learning (CPAL), a brand-new conference for the sparse ML research community, that Dr. Wang co-founds and will serve as its inaugural Program Chair
• 1 ACL'23 (sparse LLM tuning) accepted
• 1 MICCAI'23 (multi-label long-tail) accepted
• 1 AutoML-Conf'23 (neural architecture "no free lunch") accepted
• 1 TMLR (partial graph transfer learning) accepted
• Our group co-organized the ICLR 2023 Workshop on Sparsity in Neural Networks: On Practical Limitations and Tradeoffs between Sustainability and Efficiency

[Apr. 2023]

• 9 ICML'23 (Instant soup + graph ladling + robust weight signature + neural scaling law + code generation + L2O game + large kernel teacher + pre-training tax + L2O math structure) accepted
• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive the 2023 Google Research Scholar Award
• Our group co-organized the NSF IFML workshop on Models v.s. Data in ML and AI

[Mar. 2023]

• VITA Ph.D. student Greg Holste is selected to receive a 2023 academic year NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP)
• 1 TMLR (pruning for certified robustness) accepted
• We thank MIT News [article] for covering our ICLR'23 work, Learning to Grow Pretrained Models
• We thank 1littlecoder for the very cool video [Youtube] highlighting our latest work, Text2Video-Zero (ICCV'23) [Paper] [Code] [Hugging Face]

[Feb. 2023]

• 4 CVPR'23 (NeuralLift-360 + AligNeRF + MMG-Ego4D + specialist diffusion) accepted
• 1 TMLR (robust fairness) accepted
• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive tenure promotion (effective Sep 2023)

[Jan. 2023]

• 14 ICLR'23 (Ramanujan graph pruning + SMC benchmark + MoE as dropout + learning to grow + federated OoD + ConvNet 51x51 + GNT + NeRF-SOS + layered pre-training + HotProtein + hypergraph diffusion + graph domain adaptation + L2O adaptation + protein convolution) accepted
• 2 AISTATS'23 (sparse network NTK + L2O generalization) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. Image Processing (A2I2 Real Haze benchmark) accepted
• We thank MattVidPro AI for the very cool video [Youtube] highlighting our latest work, Versatile Diffusion (ICCV'23) [Paper] [Code] [Hugging Face]
• We thank IEEE Signal Processing Society [Link] for highlighting our IEEE TIP'21 work, EnlightenGAN [Paper] [Code], as one of SPS's top-25 most downloaded articles on IEEE Xplore®, 2021-2022
• Our group co-organized the 3rd Workshop on Seeking Low-Dimensionality in Deep Neural Networks (SLowDNN)

[Dec. 2022]

• We are grateful to receive the Best Paper Award from LoG 2022 [Paper]
• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive the IEEE biennial "AI's 10 To Watch" award in 2022
• VITA Ph.D. student Yifan Jiang is selected to receive a 2022 academic year Apple Scholars in AI/ML PhD fellowship

[Nov. 2022]

• VITA Ph.D. student Dejia Xu is selected to receive a 2022 academic year Snap Research Fellowship
• Our group is selected to be supported by the Meta Reality Labs Research Gift Award
• Our group is selected to be supported by the Google TensorFlow Model Garden Award (again)
• 3 AAAI'23 (safeguarded L2O + federated robustness + efficient ViT) accepted
• 1 LoG'22 (untrained graph LTH) accepted

[Oct. 2022]

• 1 WSDM'23 (search behavior prediction) accepted
• 1 WACV'23 (imbalance in medical image localization) accepted

[Sep. 2022]

• 11 NeurIPS'22 (DAG convergence + INR DSP theory + M³ViT + back razor + randomized channel shuffling + symbolic TCC + GCN gradient + trapping backdoor + multimodal training + sparse few-shot learning + hypergraph contrastive learning) accepted
• 1 NeurIPS Benchmark Track'22 (large-scale graph training) accepted

[Aug. 2022]

• VITA Ph.D. student Zhiwen Fan is selected to receive a 2022 academic year Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF)
• VITA welcomes six new Ph.D. students: Zhenyu Zhang, Tong Wang, S P Sharan, Ruisi Cai, Wenyan Cong, and Jeffrey Lai
• 1 IEEE Trans. Medical Imaging (contrastive learning on X-rays) accepted
• 1 TMLR (all-pass lottery) accepted
• 1 ICDM'22 (stochastic KD for medical imaging) accepted
• 1 CIKM'22 (multi-modal recommendation) accepted
• Our group co-organized MLSys 2022 Tutorial: Training-Free Approaches for Edge AI: Challenges, Opportunities and Progress

[Jul. 2022]

• 8 ECCV'22 (SinNeRF + INR stylization + scalable L2O + point cloud MAE + few-shot align + malleable convolution + universal ViT + turbulence) accepted
• 1 TMLR (adversarial feature augmentation) accepted
• VITA Ph.D. student Xiaohan Chen graduated and joined Alibaba Damo Academy (Decision Intelligence Lab), Seattle, as a full-time senior research scientist ("Ali Star" hire)
• Our group co-organized the 2nd workshop on Sparsity in Neural Networks: Advancing Understanding and Practice (SNN)

[Jun. 2022]

• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive the NSF CAREER Award
• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive the Aharon Katzir Young Investigator Award of International Neural Network Society (INNS)
• 1 ACM Computing Surveys (ML safety) accepted
• 1 TMLR (robust lifelong learning) accepted
• 3 ACM MM'22 (controllable light enhancement + video action detection + Cloud2Sketch) accepted
• 1 ACM BCB'22 (pretraining for COVID-19 prediction) accepted
• 1 MLHC'22 (personalized imbalanced training) accepted
• Our group co-organized the CVPR 2022 Workshop and Challenge on Bridging Computational Photography and Visual Recognition (UG2+)
• Our group co-organized the AICAS 2022 tutorial: IEEE Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge. A similar tutorial would be offered in DAC 2022

[May. 2022]

• 9 ICML'22 (long-tail OoD detection + BN-free robust training + neural implicit dictionary + improved sparse training + linearity grafting + structured lottery ticket + double-win lottery ticket + renormalization group theory + NN architecture growing) accepted
• 1 AutoML-Conf'22 (GNN NAS) accepted

[Apr. 2022]

• 1 JMLR (learning to optimize) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. PAMI (deep GCN training benchmark) accepted
• 1 ACM FAccT'22 (data efficiency under differential privacy) accepted
• We thank IEEE Computer Magazine [article] for covering our recent success in building energy-efficient computer vision systems

[Mar. 2022]

• We thank Quanta Magazine [article] for covering our NeurIPS'21 work, TransGAN
• We thank National Science Foundation (NSF) news [article] for covering our training-free NAS works, in ICLR'21 (TE-NAS) and ICLR'22 (As-ViT)

[Feb. 2022]

• 7 CVPR'22 (ViT training + Aug-NeRF + symbolic spotting + sparsity for Trojan + sparse multi-tasking + video SR + fashion CLIP) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. Image Processing (light enhancement with noise) accepted

[Jan. 2022]

• 14 ICLR'22 (symbolic L2O + disguised subnetwork + optimizer amalgamation + robust sparsity + Fourier ViT + auto-scaling ViT + ViT compression + Frank-Wolfe pruning + cold brew + audio lottery + split-max + sparse ensemble + random sparse training + Bayesian L2O) accepted
• 1 AISTATS'22 (variational feature selection) accepted
• 2 ICASSP'22 (lifelong speech synthesis + sensor data imputation) accepted
• 1 ACM Trans. DAES (efficient segmentation) accepted
• VITA Ph.D. student Tianlong Chen is selected to receive a 2022 academic year Adobe PhD Research Fellowship - that is after him being awarded IBM PhD Fellowship 2021, UT Graduate Dean’s Prestigious Fellowship 2021, and Baidu Scholarship finalist
• VITA welcomes four new Ph.D. students: Xuxi Chen, Dejia Xu, Hongru Yang and Zhangheng Li

[Dec. 2021]

• People in this group did nothing this month but enjoyed some well-deserved vacation time, with their families and loved ones

[Nov. 2021]

• 1 IEEE Trans. Neural Networks and Learning Systems (algorithm-hardware co-design to reduce data movement) accepted
• 1 AAAI'22 (federated sparse training) accepted
• Our group co-organized the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Seeking Low-dimensionality in Deep Neural Networks (SLowDNN)

[Oct. 2021]

• 1 WSDM'22 (graph contrastive learning) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. SPIN (vision-based drone swarm control) accepted
• 3 WACV'22 (video NAS + sandwich BatchNorm + chest X-rays) accepted
• Our group is selected to be supported by the Google TensorFlow Model Garden Award
• Our group co-organized the ICCV 2021 Workshop on Real-world Recognition from Low-quality Inputs (RLQ)
• VITA Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Guoliang Kang joins the CS department of University of Technology Sydney, Australia, as Lecturer (Assistant Professor) and endowed with the prestigious DECRA Fellow
• We thank Henry for the very cool video [Youtube] highlighting our latest work, AugMax (NeurIPS'21) [Paper] [Code]

[Sep. 2021]

• 13 NeurIPS'21 (TransGAN + AugMax + data-efficient GAN + elastic lottery ticket + SViTE + DePT + stealing lottery + imbalanced contrastive learning + HyperLISTA + WeakNAS + IA-RED² + neuroregeneration + lottery ticket benchmark) accepted
• Our group won the 1st prize of IEEE 2021 Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge (video track) [Solution] [Tech Report]
• 1 ICCV'21 workshop (graph CNN for motion prediction) accepted

[Aug. 2021]

• VITA welcomes five new Ph.D. students: Zhiwen Fan, Scott Hoang, Peihao Wang, Greg Holste, and Ajay Jaiswal
• 1 IEEE Trans. Image Processing (sketch-to-image synthesis) accepted
• 1 Springer Machine Learning (weakly-supervised segmentation troubleshooting) accepted

[Jul. 2021]

• 3 ICCV'21 (image harmonization + video NAS + pruning) accepted
• Our group co-organized the inaugural workshop on Sparsity in Neural Networks: Advancing Understanding and Practice (SNN)
• VITA Ph.D. student Tianlong Chen is selected to receive UT Graduate Dean’s Prestigious Fellowship, and Xiaohan Chen is selected as a Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship 2021 finalist

[Jun. 2021]

• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive the 2021 J. P. Morgan Faculty Research Award
• 1 ACM ToMM (detecting GAN mode collapse) accepted
• 2 IEEE BHI'21 (meta learning for EHR data + MoE for EHR data) accepted
• Our group co-organized the CVPR 2021 tutorial: Data- and Label-Efficient Learning in An Imperfect World
• Our group co-organized two CVPR 2021 workshops: Bridging Computational Photography and Visual Recognition (UG2+), and Future Video Conferencing (FVC)
• We thank Henry for the very cool video [Youtube] highlighting our latest work, self-damaging contrastive learning (ICML'21) [Paper] [Code]

[May. 2021]

• VITA's Summer 2021 squad of students graduated: Dr. Zhenyu Wu joined Wormpex AI Research (Seattle) as Research Scientist, Scott continues as VITA Ph.D. student, and Rahul joined ByteDance AI Lab (Silicon Valley) as Machine Learning Engineer. Congratulations!
• 5 ICML'21 (graph contrastive learning + homotopy attack + imbalanced contrastive learning + graph lottery ticket + data-efficient lottery ticket) accepted
• 1 KDD'21 (federated learning debiasing) accepted
• 1 ACL'21 (EarlyBERT) accepted
• Our group is selected to be supported by the NVIDIA Applied Research Accelerator Program

[Apr. 2021]

• VITA Ph.D. student Tianlong Chen is selected to receive a 2021 academic year IBM PhD Fellowship -- that is after Tianlong being selected as a Baidu Scholarship 2021 finalist
• 2 CVPR'21 workshop (CNN high-frequency bias + BN-free training of binary networks) accepted

[Mar. 2021]

• 1 ICME'21 (arbitrary style transfer) accepted
• We thank UT Engineering News [article] for highlighting our group's research

[Feb. 2021]

• 3 CVPR'21 (CV lottery ticket + blind image IQA + assessing image enhancement) accepted
• 1 IJCV (open-world generalization of segmentation models) accepted
• 1 DAC'21 + 1 ICASSP'21 accepted (InstantNet + VGAI)
• We thank Yannic for the very cool video [Youtube] highlighting our latest work, TransGAN (NeurIPS'21) [Paper] [Code]

[Jan. 2021]

• 8 ICLR'21 (lifelong lottery ticket + robust overfitting + nasty knowledge distillation + theory-guided NAS + domain generalization + LISTA unrolling + learning to optimize for minimax + efficient recommendation system) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. PAMI (artistic text style transfer) accepted
• We thank IDG Connect [article] for covering our ICLR'20 work, Early Bird Lottery Ticket for Effcient Deep Learning
• Our group co-organized the IJCAI 2020 BOOM Workshop
• VITA welcomes new Ph.D. student Wenqing Zheng

[Dec. 2020]

• 1 AAAI'21 (L2O for privacy protection) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. Image Processing (EnlightenGAN) accepted
• 1 Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (explainable deep learning for bioinformatics) accepted
• We thank MIT News [article] for covering our NeurIPS'20 work, BERT Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
• We thank US Army Research Lab for selecting our work of vision-based decentralized robotic control as No. 3 in US ARL’s “10 Coolest Techniques” of Year 2020 [Video Demo]
• Our group co-organized the NeurIPS 2020 Workshop on AI for Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response (HADR)
• VITA's Winter 2020 squad of M.S. students graduated: Ting-Kuei joined Qualcomm Research as Senior Deep Learning Engineer, Yunhe joined ByteDance AI Lab as Research Engineer, and Sicheng joined Walmart as Data Scientist. Congratulations!

[Nov. 2020]

• 1 IJCV (single image deraining benchmark) accepted
• Our group co-organized the 1st IEEE Workshop on Seeking Low-dimensionality in Deep Neural Networks (SLowDNN) [video record]

[Oct. 2020]

• Our three popular image enhancement algorithms: AOD-Net (ICCV 2017), EnlightenGAN (IEEE TIP 2020), and DeblurGAN-V2 (ICCV 2019), are included into the open-source GNU Image Manipulation Program toolbox (GIMP-ML), as deep-dehazing, enlighten, and deblur plugins

[Sep. 2020]

• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive the 2020 Adobe Data Science Research Award
• 8 NeurIPS'20 (learning to optimize + once-for-all adversarial training + BERT lottery ticket + meta learning + robust contrastive learning + graph contrastive learning + ShiftAddNet + efficient quantized training) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. PAMI (privacy-preserving visual recognition) accepted

[Aug. 2020]

• VITA's first Ph.D. student Ye Yuan graduated and joined ByteDance AI Lab, Silicon Valley, as a full-time researcher. A Memorable Point for both Ye and the group - Congratulations Ye!
• Our group won the 2nd place of IEEE 2020 Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge (video track)
• Our group co-organized the ECCV 2020 RLQ-TOD Workshop and Prize Challenge [video record]
• 1 IEEE Trans. GRS (deep hyperspectral image classification) accepted

[Jul. 2020]

• 3 ECCV'20 (GAN compression + sketch-to-image synthesis + on-device learning-to-optimize) accepted
• 1 ACM Multimedia'20 (MMHand synthesizer) accepted
• 1 InterSpeech'20 (AutoSpeech) accepted
• We thank Tech Xplore [article] for covering our work, adversarial 3-D logos

[Jun. 2020]

• 6 ICML'20 (domain generalization + noisy label training + self-supervised GCN + DNN optimization + GAN compression + NAS for Bayesian models) accepted
• Our group co-organized the CVPR 2020 UG2+ Workshop and Prize Challenge

[May. 2020]

• 1 IEEE Trans. PAMI (image enhancement for visual understanding) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. Mobile Computing (adaptive model compression) accepted

[Apr. 2020]

• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive the 2020 ARO Young Investigator Award (YIP)
• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive the 2020 IBM Faculty Research Award
• Dr. Wang is grateful to receive the 2020 Amazon Research Award (AWS AI)
• 2 CVPR'20 workshop (efficient triplet loss + fine-grained classification) accepted

[Mar. 2020]

• 1 ISCA'20 (algorithm-hardware co-design to reduce data movement) accepted

[Feb. 2020]

• 3 CVPR'20 (self-supervised adversarial robustness + fast GCN training + indoor scene reasoning) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. Image Processing (visual understanding in poor-visibility environments) accepted

[Jan. 2020]

• 1 AISTATS'20 (CNN uncertainty quantification) accepted
• 1 IEEE Trans. CSVT (GAN data augmentation) accepted