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ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Bang Liu is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the University of Montreal (UdeM), Canada. He is an associate member of the Mila – Quebec AI Institute, a member of Institut Courtois at UdeM, and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. His research focuses on natural language processing, large language models and agents, multimodal and embodied learning, and AI for Science (e.g., materials science). He has published more than 100 papers and tutorials in high-level conferences and journals. He has served as the area chair of conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, and IJCAI, as well as the action editor of the Neural Networks journal. He has received the Amazon Research Award (2025 Spring), 2025 WAIC Yunfan Award (Bright Star), the 2024 WAIC Yunfan Award (Rising Star), the University of Montreal Research Excellence Award, the WWW 2023 Best Paper Nomination, the George Walker PhD Thesis Award, etc.
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ABSTRACT:
This talk explores how agentic intelligence can improve along two axes: evolving a single agent and coordinating multiple agents. First, I introduce Programmatic Skill Networks, a framework in which agents continually acquire, repair, stabilize, and refactor reusable skills, turning a static skill library into an evolving structure for long-horizon learning. Second, I examine when multi-agent systems are actually preferable to scaling up a single agent under the same budget. The key message is that scale-out only helps when communication is reliable, shared failures are low, and the organization gains exceed single-agent compute scaling. These results suggest that future agents should be not only larger, but self-improving, reusable, and principled in how they coordinate.
WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:
Business Leaders: C-Level Executives, Project Managers, and Product Owners will get to explore best practices, methodologies, principles, and practices for achieving ROI.
Engineers, Researchers, Data Practitioners: Will get a better understanding of the challenges, solutions, and ideas being offered via breakouts & workshops on Natural Language Processing, Neural Nets, Reinforcement Learning, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Evolution Strategies, AutoML, and more.
Job Seekers: Will have the opportunity to network virtually and meet over 30+ Top Al Companies.
Ignite what is an Ignite Talk?
Ignite is an innovative and fast-paced style used to deliver a concise presentation.
During an Ignite Talk, presenters discuss their research using 20 image-centric slides which automatically advance every 15 seconds.
The result is a fun and engaging five-minute presentation.
You can see all our speakers and full agenda here