Attend LIONS seminar with guest Martina Cardone, April 24

About:

Join the Learning, Information, Optimization, Networks and Statistics, or LIONS, group for a seminar with Martina Cardone, associate professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota. An NSF CAREER Award recipient, Cardone’s research aims to develop theoretical frameworks that offer engineering guidelines and insights for the study of practically relevant problems and to design of computationally feasible techniques aimed to achieve the fundamental theoretical performance limits as close as possible

Abstract:

Focal loss has emerged as a de facto training loss in class-imbalanced classification problems, especially in computer vision. Despite its empirical success, its theoretical properties and benefits have not been well explored. In this talk, we investigate several information-theoretic aspects of focal loss, including its connection to relative entropy and the emergence of novel information measures it induces. These results, which are also experimentally validated, provide a theoretical foundation for understanding focal loss and help clarify the trade-offs it introduces when applied to imbalanced learning tasks. We also propose the focal loss as a distortion measure for lossy source coding and discuss some research directions that are the object of current investigation.

Seminar host:

Our host for this LIONS Seminar is Nicolo Michelusi, associate professor in the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University.

Visit the LIONS Seminar website for more information.

LIONS Seminar
Friday, April 24, 2026
1:30–2:30 p.m.
Goldwater Center for Science and Engineering (GWC) 487, Tempe campus [map]