The second ELLIIT focus period taking place in spring of 2026 is hosted by Lund University, and concerns optimization for learning. The focus period symposium took place in beginning of May, bringing together 80 attendees for discussing theory and practice of optimization.
Across the symposium program, speakers addressed a central question: how can optimization methods evolve to support increasingly large, distributed, and complex machine learning systems? As the large language models scale in size and complexity, the development is mirrored in and supported by the advances in optimization. Ultimately, it is the optimization methods that shape how models can be trained, and how robustly they perform.
”The symposium offered a rich overview of current research, with contributions spanning federated learning, first-order and spectral optimizers, step-size strategies, LLM training dynamics, methodologies for optimizer design, and theoretical foundations for optimization in modern machine learning”, says Pontus Giselsson, associate professor and organizer of the focus period.
The symposium gathered an international group of speakers from universities, research institutes, and industry labs including ETH Zurich, KAUST, Meta AI, UCLA, and Inria Paris.
”We are thankful for the great turn out of so many international top speakers who participated in the symposium and shared their research and insights with attendees and the visiting scholars here in Lund”, says Pontus Giselsson.
Encouraging collaboration
Beyond the invited speakers talks, the symposium program offered poster sessions, time for networking and activities to foster collaboration between junior researchers and senior academics, the fundament of the ELLIIT focus period idea. The welcome reception was hosted at the Historical Museum at Lund University, and included exclusive guided tours of the collections. The symposium dinner was held at the Turning Torso in neighboring city of Malmö, with sunset views over the city and the Öresund-strait all the way to Copenhagen.
Professor Anders Rantzer, ELLIIT focus period director, welcomed attendees to the symposium on May 6th.
Pontus Giselsson, focus period organizer.
The symposium for focus period on Optimization for Learning took place in Lund, May 6-8th, 2026. The organizing committee for the focus period on Optimization for Learning were Pontus Giselsson, Eva Westin, Marco Dell’Oro, Max Nilsson, Markus Ydreskog, Anton Åkerman, Lund University.
Symposium
Find the complete symposium program with speaker bios and presentation abstracts here, and more photos from the symposium days.
Focus Period
Read more about the focus period on Optimization for learning, its invited speakers, and visiting scholars and their program.