news

May 01, 2025 Adnan Mohammed and Rohan Jain’s work on “Sparse Training from Random Initialization: Aligning Lottery Ticket Masks using Weight Symmetry” (Adnan et al., 2025) has been accepted at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2025. This work explores the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) and sparse training from a random initialization through the lens of weight and permutation symmetry, proposing a novel approach to improve LTH mask generalization across new random initialization.
Apr 27, 2025 Yani Ioannou and Adnan Mohammed coorganized the Workshop on Sparsity in LLMs (SLLM) Workshop accepted at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025. The workshop aimed to bring together researchers and practitioners to discuss the latest advancements in efficient inference and training for large language models (LLMs). The workshop accepted 71 papers as posters, with 4 as Orals, along with 4 invited talks and a panel of 6 leading figures in the research area. Please see more about the workshop in the following Linkedin post: Sparsity in LLMs Workshop at ICLR 2025.
Feb 24, 2025 Yufan Feng, has been awarded an Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship (AGES) to support her MSc. studies. The AGES scholarships are awarded to students enrolled in an Alberta-based Graduate degree, and are based on outstanding academic achievement.
Feb 05, 2025 Aida Mohammadshahi’s work on “What’s Left After Distillation? How Knowledge Transfer Impacts Fairness and Bias” (Mohammadshahi & Ioannou, 2025) has been accepted to the Transactions of Machine Learning Research (TMLR). This work investigates the impact of distillation on the bias and fairness of decisions made by distilled student models, providing valuable insights into the trade-offs involved in this widely used technique.
Dec 05, 2024 The Calgary Machine Learning Lab, will have 5 different works being presented by 6 students across the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2024 workshops (UniReps, WiML, MusiML) and main conference! Please see our full conference schedule here for details.
Nov 24, 2024 Adnan Mohammed was awarded the RBC Borealis AI Fellowship, awarded to only ten PhD students across Canada.
Jul 24, 2024 Adnan Mohammed was recently awarded the NSERC Doctoral Fellowship (120,000 CAD for the next three years). The program provides financial support to high-calibre PhD students across Canada.
Jul 02, 2024 Mike Lasby was recently awarded the Faculty of Graduate Studies Doctoral Scholarship which recognizes his research contributions and academic achievements to date. Mike also recently passed his PhD Candidacy examination which puts him one step closer towards graduation!
Apr 01, 2024 CML was awarded 24 RGU (approx. 6 A100-years) of GPU compute in the Digital Research Alliance of Canada Resources for Research Groups (RRG) 2024 competition, to support our research. The RRG program provides access to a large-scale GPU clusters for academic research groups in Canada.
Mar 01, 2024 Muhammad Athar Ganaie was awarded a Mitacs Globalink Graduate Fellowship, to support his MSc research at the University of Calgary. The fellowship will support his research on the development of sparse neural networks for deep reinforcment learning.
Jan 16, 2024 Mike Lasby’s collaborative work with researchers at Google DeepMind, MIT and the Vector Institute, “Dynamic Sparse Training with Structured Sparsity” (Lasby et al., 2024), was accepted at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2024! DST methods learn state-of-the-art sparse masks, but accelerating DNNs with unstructured masks is difficult. SRigL learns structured masks, improving real-world CPU/GPU timings!
Dec 06, 2023 Mike Lasby and Adnan Mohammed were awarded highly competitive scholarships in the 2023 Graduate Award Competition: Mike was awarded an Alberta Innovates Graduate Studentship (Technology) in the 2023 Graduate Award Competition. The Government of Alberta funds Alberta Innovates Graduate Studentships (Technology) to support top-quality, research related to Information and Communications Technology (ICT), Nanotechnology, and other technology areas. Adnan was awarded the Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship (AGES), recognizing outstanding academic achievement in graduate studies.
Nov 30, 2023 Tejas Pote had his workshop paper Classification Bias on a Data Diet (Pote et al., 2024) accepted at the Conference on Parsimony and Learning (CPAL)’s Recent Spotlight Track, and will present it in Hong Kong in January 2024.
May 05, 2023 Yani Ioannou gave an invited talk at the ICLR 2023 Workshop on Sparsity in Neural Networks in Kigali, Rwanda recently, talking about Mike Lasby’s recent work on learning structured sparsity in dynamic sparse training methods. Yani also participated in the first panel discussion on sparsity. You can watch the full workshop here.
Feb 02, 2023 Yani Ioannou was featured on the University of Calgary’s news website, UToday! You can read the full article here!.
Nov 25, 2022 We have been awarded an Alberta Innovates Advance, Stream II/NSERC Alliance grant for our research project investigating learning structure in neural networks for novel data domains over the next two years. Alberta Innovates Advance invests in projects that, in alignment with Alberta’s technology and innovation strategies, advance discoveries to develop emerging technologies which can generate economic, environmental, health and social benefits for Albertans and Canadians.
Oct 11, 2022 We have been awarded an Amazon Research Award — a highly competitive international awarded based on the merit of a research proposal. Our research proposal “Addressing Catastrophic Forgetting with Dynamic Sparse Training” proposes to explore the effect of dynamic sparse training on catastrophic forgetting.
Sep 01, 2022 Our newest lab member, Aida Mohammadshahi, has been awarded an Alberta Graduate Excellence Scholarship (AGES) to support her MSc. studies. The AGES scholarships are awarded to students enrolled in an Alberta-based Graduate degree, and are based on outstanding academic achievement.
Aug 30, 2022 We have been awarded a 2022 National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Department’s of National Defence (DND) Discovery Grant Supplement — one of only 20 awarded nationally! This supplement will help accelerate our research over the next 3 years.
Jul 13, 2022 Our workshop paper, (Golubeva et al., 2022), was accepted at the 2nd Sparsity in Neural Networks workshop.
Jun 25, 2022 We are grateful to have been awarded a 2022 National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant and Discovery Launch Supplement to support our research over the next 5 years.
Jun 13, 2022 Our workshop paper, (Adnan et al., 2022), was accepted at the ICML 2022 workshop on spurious correlations, invariance and stability.
Jan 12, 2022 Our paper, (Evci et al., 2022), has been accepted to be presented as an Oral at the 2022 AAAI Conference! The conference had a 15% acceptance rate for posters alone.
Sep 01, 2021 Yani Ioannou started as an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary.