Friday 27 February 2026 - 11am Speaker: Yihong Chen (University of Oxford)Title: On The Role of Structure in Building Controllable AIAbstract: Structure plays a dual role in modern AI systems: it enables efficient and stable learning, but can also trap models in outdated or inappropriate knowledge. Controllability therefore requires not only building structure, but also selectively breaking it. This talk highlights active forgetting as a mechanism for removing entrenched structure to improve model plasticity and generalization to unseen languages. Because neural models do not store knowledge in explicit symbolic units, effective control depends on making internal representations visible. Jet expansions provide a tool for surfacing and inspecting hidden structure, such as in-weight n-grams, and potentially enabling more targeted intervention. More broadly, this talk frames structure and destructure as complementary principles for building transparent and controllable knowledge engines.Biography: Yihong Chen is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning (OATML) group. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College London through the FAIR–UCL PhD Programme, jointly hosted with Meta AI. Her research aims to understand intelligence and its computational realization, focusing on how knowledge is formed, represented, and used for reasoning and generalization. Her work spans both structured and unstructured learning approaches, including knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, and language models. Methodologically, she is particularly interested in learning processes that shape knowledge over long time horizons, such as meta-learning and continual learning. She previously studied Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University and has conducted research at Microsoft Research Asia and Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab. More information is available at https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/yihong.chen/. Feb 27 2026 11.00 - 12.00 Friday 27 February 2026 - 11am Speaker: Yihong Chen (University of Oxford) IF, G.03
Friday 27 February 2026 - 11am Speaker: Yihong Chen (University of Oxford)Title: On The Role of Structure in Building Controllable AIAbstract: Structure plays a dual role in modern AI systems: it enables efficient and stable learning, but can also trap models in outdated or inappropriate knowledge. Controllability therefore requires not only building structure, but also selectively breaking it. This talk highlights active forgetting as a mechanism for removing entrenched structure to improve model plasticity and generalization to unseen languages. Because neural models do not store knowledge in explicit symbolic units, effective control depends on making internal representations visible. Jet expansions provide a tool for surfacing and inspecting hidden structure, such as in-weight n-grams, and potentially enabling more targeted intervention. More broadly, this talk frames structure and destructure as complementary principles for building transparent and controllable knowledge engines.Biography: Yihong Chen is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the Oxford Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning (OATML) group. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College London through the FAIR–UCL PhD Programme, jointly hosted with Meta AI. Her research aims to understand intelligence and its computational realization, focusing on how knowledge is formed, represented, and used for reasoning and generalization. Her work spans both structured and unstructured learning approaches, including knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, and language models. Methodologically, she is particularly interested in learning processes that shape knowledge over long time horizons, such as meta-learning and continual learning. She previously studied Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University and has conducted research at Microsoft Research Asia and Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab. More information is available at https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/yihong.chen/. Feb 27 2026 11.00 - 12.00 Friday 27 February 2026 - 11am Speaker: Yihong Chen (University of Oxford) IF, G.03
