This event is co-presented by

Distinguished Lecture Series Returns

Vector Institute and the University of Toronto's Department of Computer Science will host a Distinguished Lecture by Professor Yejin Choi, a leading researcher in artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

This Distinguished Lecture Series brings globally renowned scholars to engage with students, faculty, and the broader community on key topics in computer science. Professor Choi’s talk will explore the frontiers of AI reasoning, language understanding, and ethical considerations in developing
responsible AI systems. 
 

Why Attend:
Gain direct insight into the future of AI from a leading researcher actively steering the field. Students, faculty, alumni, and researchers will leave with actionable perspectives and valuable connections across the university ecosystem.

Event Format
Join us for a talk and Q&A from 5:30 –7 p.m., followed by a networking reception with refreshments from 7–8 p.m., open to all attendees.

Talk Title: The Art of (Artificial) Reasoning

Scaling laws suggest that “more is more” — brute-force scaling of data and compute leads to stronger AI capabilities. However, despite rapid progress on benchmarks, state-of-the-art models still exhibit "jagged intelligence," indicating that current scaling approaches may have limitations in terms of sustainability and robustness. Additionally, while the volume of papers on arXiv continues to grow rapidly, our scientific understanding of artificial intelligence hasn't kept pace with engineering advances, and the current literature presents seemingly contradictory findings that can be difficult to reconcile.

In this talk, Professor Yejin will discuss key insights into the strengths and limitations of LLMs, examine when reinforcement learning succeeds or struggles in reasoning tasks, and explore methods for enhancing reasoning capabilities in smaller language models to help them close the gap against their larger counterparts in specific domains.

Professor Yejin Choi
Professor Yejin Choi
Professor of Computer Science; Senior Fellow, Stanford University HAI | Distinguished Scientist; Language and Cognition Research, NVIDIA
Yejin Choi is the Dieter Schwarz Foundation Professor and Senior Fellow at the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) respectively. She is a Distinguished Scientist at NVIDIA, and was previously Professor at UW and Senior Director at AI2. Choi is a MacArthur Fellow (class of 2022), AI2050 Senior Fellow (class of 2024), and named among Time100's Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and 2025. In addition, Choi is a co-recipient of 2 Test-of-Time awards and 10 Best and Outstanding Paper Awards at top AI conferences including ACL, ICML, NeurIPS, ICCV, CVPR, and AAAI, the Borg Early Career Award (BECA) in 2018, the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017, and IEEE AI’s 10 to Watch in 2016.

Choi was a main stage speaker at TED 2023, and a keynote speaker for a dozen conferences across several AI disciplines including ACL, CVPR, ICLR, MLSys, VLDB, WebConf, and AAAI. Her current research interests include fundamental limits and capabilities of large language models, alternative training recipes for language models, symbolic methods for neural networks, reasoning and knowledge discovery, moral norms and values, pluralistic alignment, and AI safety.