NUS Presidential Young Professor Kenji Kawaguchi wins Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2024

NUS Presidential Young Professor Kenji Kawaguchi, from the Department of Computer Science at NUS School of Computing (NUS Computing), has won the Best Paper Award at the prestigious NeurIPS 2024 conference. Held from 10 to 15 December 2024, the event featured global experts in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, with the Best Paper Award being a hallmark of excellence for highly impactful papers from leading researchers who are making exceptional contributions to the field of Machine Learning.

Prof Kawaguchi’s paper titled “Stochastic Taylor Derivative Estimator: Efficient Amortization for Arbitrary Differential Operators” (STDE) co-authored with Dr Min Lin (Head of Research at the Sea AI Lab), Mr Zekun Shi (PhD student at NUS Computing), and Mr Zheyuan Hu (PhD student at NUS Computing) addresses a critical challenge in AI and computational mathematics — efficient computation of derivatives for complex systems. The team’s innovative STDE introduces a scalable, efficient, and highly parallisable method to solve high-dimensional problems, significantly reducing computational demand while improving accuracy.  In a demonstration of its prowess, the team solved a million-dimensional problem in just eight minutes on a single GPU, a task that would have taken traditional methods weeks.

Prof Kawaguchi and his team’s work on STDE holds vast potential for real-world applications, including simulating entire galaxies, engineering smarter devices, advancing renewable energy, transforming healthcare, revolutionising finance, and accelerating drug discovery.

This accolade marks a proud and significant milestone for NUS Computing, highlighting the School’s leadership in driving impactful and innovative advancements in AI research.

Read more about STDE

NUS News, 15 January 2025

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