Shenzhen University School of Mathematical Sciences  

Liyuan Scholars Colloquium No. 126  

Lecture Title: Mathematical Foundations and Applications of Generative Artificial Intelligence

Speaker: Sun Jian (Professor, Xi'an Jiaotong University)  

Date & Time: 2:30–3:30 PM, May 12, 2025  

Venue: Classroom 3, Huixing Building, Yuehai Campus, Shenzhen University  

Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence represents an important direction in the development of general artificial intelligence. It primarily involves designing AI algorithms to learn from multi-modal, high-dimensional complex sample distributions and generate new samples. This serves as the methodological foundation for applying AI to problems such as automatic question answering, cross-modal generation, and AI for science. The underlying basis of generative artificial intelligence lies in mathematics and statistics. This talk will introduce the background, mathematical and statistical principles, and challenges of generative artificial intelligence. It will further present an AI method for controllable/conditional generation based on optimal transport and its applications in medical image generation, multi-modal image-text alignment, etc. Finally, it will summarize and forecast the development and prospects of generative artificial intelligence.  

Biography: Sun Jian, a professor and recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. He has long been engaged in research on mathematical models and algorithms in artificial intelligence, especially in image and medical image analysis. His research mainly includes inverse problems in imaging, medical auxiliary diagnosis, and fundamental models and algorithms for generative and generalizability issues in artificial intelligence. He has won the First Prize of the Shaanxi Provincial Natural Science Award (as the first contributor) and the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award (as the second contributor). He has worked as a postdoctoral fellow or visiting scholar at Microsoft Research Asia, École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Inria (National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) in France. He serves as the Associate Dean of the School of Mathematics and Statistics at Xi'an Jiaotong University, a member of the Science and Technology Committee of the Ministry of Education, the Executive Dean of the Xi'an Institute of Mathematics and Mathematical Technology. He is also an editorial board member of top international journals in the field of artificial intelligence, such as IEEE TPAMI and IJCV, and has served as a chair for conferences like ICCV, ECCV , ICLR and CVPR.  

All faculty and students are welcome to attend!

School of Mathematical Sciences  

May 7, 2025