Deep Learning School 2025

The Deep Learning School at Université Côte d'Azur is a major scientific event for the research and engineering communities working at the frontline of AI. Since 2017, we have provided our extended ecosystem with the opportunity to learn from prestigious AI researchers and practicing the latest techniques in hands-on sessions with local expert supervisors.
 

Whether you are a researcher, an engineer, an expert in deep learning, or simply eager to learn more about these crucial methods at the core of modern AI, this program is designed for you!
 

The DLS 2025 prestigious lineup


Prof. Zeynep Akata
Technical University of Munich

Prof. Yulan He
King's College London

Prof. Dan Jurafsky
Stanford University

Prof. Stuart Russell
UC Berkeley

Prof. Mihaela Van der Schaar
University of Cambridge

Hugging Face
 

Hugging Face @ DLS 2025
 

Elie Bakouch
Co-leader of SmolLM Team

Nouamane Tazi
Co-leader of Ultra-scale Playbook Team

 

Practical information

  • When?

June 23rd, 2025 to July 4th, 2025

  • Where?

Campus SophiaTech, Sophia Antipolis

  • Language

English

  • Target audience

Engineers, master and doctorate students, researchers

  • Pre-requisite 

▸ Master of Science
▸ If you do not have strong background and practice in machine learning, you are strongly advised to register to tutorials, additionally to conferences
▸ Being currently employed or seeking a job

Registration

Please do provide any useful information allowing us to identify which category of registration fees applies to your case.
External companies / Individuals

Price per week (tutorials and conferences): 900 €
Price per week (conferences only): 500 €

Register

Partnering companies / Individuals

Price per week (tutorials and conferences): 810 €
Price per week (conferences only): 450 €

Register

External academic staff

Price per week (tutorials and conferences): 630 €
Price per week (conferences only): 350 €

Register

Academic staff from EFELIA Côte d’Azur consortium

Price per week (tutorials and conferences): 220 €
Price per week (conferences only): 220 €

Register

Week 1
Tutorials: Monday and Tuesday
Conferences: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday

Week 2
Tutorials: Monday and Tuesday
Conferences: Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday

Prices include lectures with labs or tutorials with labs for each day.

Detailed program

Monday, June 23

Tutorial and lab: Build your own LLM from Scratch  

  • Morning: Refresher Pytorch, Multi-Layer Perceptron, Recurrent Neural Network, applied to Natural Language Processing
  • Afternoon: Tokenizer, Text embedding, Attention

Speakers: Prof. Frederic Precioso & Team EFELIA Côte d'Azur

Tuesday, June 24

Tutorial and lab: Build your own LLM from Scratch

  • Morning: Transformer-Encoder, Attention, Multi-Head Attention
  • Afternoon: LLM (Encoder) for Text Classification, for Image + Text classification

Speakers: Prof. Frederic Precioso & Team EFELIA Côte d'Azur

Wednesday, June 25
  • Morning

Speaker: Elie Bakouch, Co-leader of SmolLM Team at Hugging Face
Topic: SmolLM, how Small Language Models can compete with LLMs

  • Afternoon

Speaker: Nouamane Tazi, Co-leader of Ultra-scale Playbook Team at Hugging Face
Topic: The Ultra-Scale Playbook - Training efficiently LLMs on GPU Clusters

Thursday, June 26
  • Speaker: Prof. Mihaela van der Schaar, University of Cambridge (UK)
  • Topic: Machine Learning and Data-centric AI for Healthcare and Medecine
Friday, June 27
  • Speaker: Prof. Yulan He, King’s College London (UK)
  • Topic: Self-evolution of large language models (LLMs)
Monday, June 30

Tutorial and lab: Build your own LLM from Scratch

  • Morning: Transformer-Decoder, Masked Multi-Head Attention, LLM(Decoder) for Text generation
  • Afternoon: LLM(Encoder-Decoder), Cross-Attention, for Translation, Summarization

Speakers: Prof. Frederic Precioso & Team EFELIA Côte d'Azur

Tuesday, July 1st

Tutorial and lab: Build your own LLM from Scratch

  • Morning: Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)
  • Afternoon: Use case DeepSeek R1  

Speakers: Prof. Frederic Precioso & Team EFELIA Côte d'Azur

Wednesday, July 2nd
  • Speaker: Prof. Zeynep Akata, Technical University of Munich (Germany)
  • Topic: Vision Language Models and General Knowledge Transfer 
Thursday, July 3rd
  • Speaker: Prof. Dan Jurafsky, Stanford University (USA)
  • Topic: LLMs assessment, Ethics
Friday, July 4th

Speaker: Prof. Stuart Russell, University of California at Berkeley (USA)
Topic: From Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback for LLMs to Assistance Games