The ACM seminar provides a regular venue for presenting and discussing topics such as numerical analysis, scientific computing, modeling, simulation and visualization. The seminar also hosts regular group meetings and special presentations associated with the NSF-funded RTG program Computation- and Data-Enabled Science (CADES).
Faculty, students and researchers are welcome to attend and present.
Meetings will be held in FHM 462, the large conference room in our department, unless specifically indicated otherwise. Unless specifically stated otherwise, the seminar meeting time will be Fridays at 10:30am.
Notification of upcoming presentations, including Zoom links when relevant, will be sent as calendar invitations to those on our mailing list. To subscribe, click here.
Organizer: Prof. Jeffrey Ovall (jovall@pdx.edu)
Current Seminar Schedule: Fall 2026
October 2 (10:30am): RTG Group Meeting
Research updates:
October 9 (10:30am): Mark Lowell, Clarifai Inc.
Title: Progressive Sharpening is Caused by Layerwise Jacobian Alignment
Abstract: During neural network training, the sharpness of the Hessian matrix of the training loss rises until training is on the edge of stability. As a result, even nonstochastic gradient descent does not accurately model the underlying dynamical system defined by the gradient flow of the training loss. We use an exponential Euler solver to train the network without entering the edge of stability, so that we accurately approximate the true gradient descent dynamics. We demonstrate experimentally that the increase in the sharpness of the Hessian matrix is caused by the layerwise Jacobian matrices of the network becoming aligned, so that a small change in the network preactivations near the inputs of the network can cause a large change in the outputs of the network. We further demonstrate that the degree of alignment scales with the size of the dataset by a power law with a coefficient of determination between 0.74 and 0.98.
October 16 (10:30am): TBA
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October 23 (10:30am): TBA
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October 30 (10:30am): TBA
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November 6 (10:30am): RTG Group Meeting
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November 13 (10:30am): TBA
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November 20 (10:30am): TBA
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December 4 (10:30am): RTG Group Meeting
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Dates for Winter 2027
January 8
January 15
January 22
January 29
February 5
February 12
February 19
February 26
March 5
March 12