Welcome to the OPTML Group

About Us

OPtimization and Trustworthy Machine Learning (OPTML) group is an active research group at Michigan State University. Our research interests span the areas of machine learning (ML)/ deep learning (DL), optimization, computer vision, security, signal processing and data science, with a focus on developing learning algorithms and theory, as well as robust and explainable artificial intelligence (AI). These research themes provide a solid foundation for reaching the long-term research objective: Making AI systems scalable and trustworthy.

As AI moves from the lab into the real world (e.g., autonomous vehicles), ensuring its safety becomes a paramount requirement prior to its deployment. Moreover, as datasets, ML/DL models, and learning tasks become increasingly complex, getting ML/DL to scale calls for new advances in learning algorithm design. More broadly, the study towards robust and scalable AI could make a significant impact on machine learning theories, and induce more promising applications in, e.g., automated ML, meta-learning, privacy and security, hardware design, and big data analysis. We seek a new learning frontier when the current learning algorithms become infeasible, and formalize foundations of secure learning.

We always look for passionate students to join the team in terms of RA/TA/externship/internship/visiting students (more info)!

Representative Publications

Authors marked in bold indicate our group members, and “*” indicates equal contribution.

Trustworthy AI: Robustness, fairness, and model explanation

Scalable AI: Model compression, distributed learning, black-box optimization, and automated ML

Sponsors

We are grateful for funding from Michigan State University, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, DARPA, Cisco Research, NSF, and DSO National Laboratories.


News

1. March 2023

Grateful to receive a grant from DSO National Laboratories.

27. February 2023

Two papers accepted in CVPR’23.

16. February 2023

Three papers accepted in ICASSP’23.

11. February 2023

CVPR’23 tutorial on Reverse Engineering of Deception: Foundations and Applications is accepted and will be given with Xiaoming Liu (MSU) and Xue Lin (Northeastern).

09. February 2023

AAAI’23 tutorial on Bi-level Optimization in ML: Foundations and Applications is now available!

20. January 2023

Four papers accepted in ICLR 2023: Issues and Fixes in IRM, TextGrad: Differentiable Solution to NLP Attack Generation, Provable Benefits of Sparse GNN, Sample Complexity Analysis of ViT

17. December 2022

One paper accepted in ASPDAC 2023: Data-Model-Circuit Tri-Design for Ultra-Light Video Intelligence on Edge Devices.

17. December 2022

One paper accepted in SANER 2023: Towards Both Robust and Accurate Code Models; Equally contributed by Jinghan Jia (MSU) and Shashank Srikant (MIT).

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