Stanford Data-Centric AI Workshop

Foundations, Agents, and Scientific Discovery

Tuesday, November 3, 2026 · 08:30 - 18:00 Pacific Time · Stanford University & online livestream

Stanford Data Science Affiliates Program

The event has wrapped up. Thank you to everyone who joined! The full livestream recording is available on YouTube. Watch the recording
This year's workshop will spotlight three fast-moving frontiers in data-centric AI:
  • AI Systems - making frontier models fast and scalable.
  • AI for Science and Biology - agents and foundation models across the scales of biology.
  • Relational and Tabular Foundation Models - learning directly on the structured data that runs the world.

This workshop brings together Stanford researchers and industry partners to explore advances in data-centric AI, spanning tabular and relational foundation models, agentic systems, and applications in biology and science. Through research talks, case studies, and discussion, the workshop will highlight emerging ideas, foster new collaborations, and examine how frontier research creates value in real-world settings. Whether you're working in industry, academia, or startup land, there will be something to spark your curiosity and drive your work forward.

Registration

The Stanford Data-Centric AI Workshop (aka the Stanford Graph Learning Workshop) will be held on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, 08:30 - 18:00 Pacific Time.

The event will take place at Stanford University and will be live-streamed online on YouTube. Free registrations are available. Register now!

Schedule

Tentative agenda, subject to change.

08:30 - 09:00 Registration & Breakfast
09:00 - 09:10 Jure Leskovec (Stanford) Welcome and Overview
09:10 - 09:30 Rishabh Ranjan (Stanford) The Stanford Tabular and Relational (STAR) Ecosystem
09:30 - 09:50 Vignesh Kothapalli (Stanford) Generating Large Scale Synthetic and Semi-Synthetic Datasets for Relational Foundation Models
09:50 - 10:10 Joseph Meyer (SAP) RFMs & TFMs at SAP
10:10 - 10:30 Akihiro Nitta (NVIDIA) Kumo Tabular: Pushing the Accuracy-Efficiency Frontier on Structured Data
10:30 - 11:00 Break
11:00 - 11:20 Vignesh Kothapalli (Stanford) Memorilla: Latent Semantic Memory for LLMs
11:20 - 11:40 Marcel Roed (Stanford) Gigatoken: 1000x faster language model tokenization
11:40 - 12:00 Atindra Jha (Stanford) M*: A Modular, Extensible, Serving System for Multimodal Models
12:00 - 13:30 Lunch & Poster session
13:30 - 13:50 Yanay Rosen (Stanford) Building Hierarchical Foundation Models for Biology
13:50 - 14:10 Kuan Pang (Stanford) Learning What Data to Collect for Frontier Models in Biology
14:10 - 14:30 Fang Wu (Stanford) Beyond Generation: Reasoning and Search for Protein Design
14:30 - 15:00 Break
15:00 - 15:20 Moritz Schaefer (Stanford) Agentic concept decomposition for scientific hypothesis generation
15:20 - 15:40 Tatsu Hashimoto (Stanford) Data efficient language modeling
15:40 - 16:00 James Zou (Stanford) Learning a physiology foundation model
16:00 - 16:30 Poster slam
16:30 - 18:00 Happy Hour & Poster session

Posters

  1. Jiyuan Tan: Simons: Open Foundation Models for Zero-Shot Time Series Forecasting
  2. Huahai Yang: The Graph Is Not Given: A Declarative Semantic Layer for Relational Foundation Models
  3. Bingran You: FrontierPhysics: Evaluating Agents for End-to-End Physics Research
  4. Arjun Roy: TopoPrune: Robust Data Pruning via Unified Latent Space Topology
  5. Usama Bin Safeer: Dunbar based Structural encoding for Graph Transformers
  6. Venkat Dayala: Agentic Data Transformation and Mapping: Turning Heterogeneous Clinical Data into Foundation-Model-Ready Relational Databases
  7. Dijana Janjetovic: More Table per Token: Format Markup Does Not Pay Off in LLM Pretraining
  8. Rotem Ben-Shachar: AI-Powered Clinical Data Extraction for Rare Disease Diagnosis
  9. Luyang Zhang: Pick the Mixture, Not the Samples: Combinatorial Data Selection for LLMs
  10. Christos Ziakas: Fork-and-Flush: Escaping Idea Basins in Autoresearch Agents
  11. Harun Pirim: Constrained Neighbour Selection for Link Prediction on Noisy Knowledge Graphs
  12. Vassilis N. Ioannidis: Learning Enterprise Semantics for AI-Ready Knowledge Bases
  13. Tim Tsz-Kit Lau: Symmetry-Compatible Principle for Optimizer Design: Embeddings, LM Heads, SwiGLU MLPs, and MoE Routers
  14. Arpita Shanbhag: Training Size and Irrelevant-Feature Robustness in TabPFN
  15. Saptarshi Sengupta: On Link Prediction Using Node-Pair LLM Semantics and Structure in Temporal Text-Attributed Graphs
  16. Gajanan Chinchwadkar: Synapse: Multi-Model Graph Retrieval with Integrated Graph ML Execution
  17. Yiyuan Luo: Lend Me Your Eyes: Instruction-Aware Text Embeddings via Attention Relay
  18. Jinhee Lee: Surgical Vision-Language Model with AI-Generated Rationales
  19. Meghana Shanthappa: Combining Language-Derived and Walk-Text Features for Product Graph Classification
  20. Kristin Gleitsman: A Biologically Grounded Structural Causal Model Enables cfRNA-Specific In-Context Learning
  21. Kenny Peng: A Testable Theory of Atomic Features
  22. Mattias Akke: LLM sequential decision making under uncertainty in biochemical domains
  23. Aditya Shivakumar: FlowQuery: LLM-Based Text-to-SQL over Fragmented California Water Data for Farmers
  24. Michael Kim: Graph Neural Networks for Accelerated Materials Simulation
  25. Abhinav Sudhakar Dubey: Jailbreaking Open-Weight LLMs Via Random Embedding Perturbations
  26. Saksorn Ruangtanusak: Relational Deep Learning In Practice: From Enterprise Databases To Predictive Models
  27. Yuche Gao: CIDER-FM: Foundation Models for Causal Inference from Diverse Experimental Regimes
  28. Maksat Jazbay: SeisGeoSolver: Seismic modeling using graph neural networks and physics-attention mechanism
  29. Jongmin Sung: CombiCast: Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Agent Decision Support for Combination-Therapy Partner Selection
  30. Sirjan Ghimire: Noise is Not Always Noise: Task-Dependent Effects of Retrieval Noise on Abstractive QA and Knowledge Synthesis in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
  31. Jiajin Liu: GraphSearch: Agentic Search-Augmented Reasoning for Zero-Shot Graph Learning
  32. Haiming Tang: RelSports: A Multi-League Relational Benchmark for Sports Forecasting Across Leagues and Domains
  33. Zhenglun Kong: Structured Agent Distillation for Large Language Model Agents
  34. Utsav Gupta: When to Recheck: Discovery and Verification in a Simulated Protein Laboratory
  35. Shu Wan: Kov: A Causal Discovery Foundation Model via Amortized Stacking
  36. Sumanth Kumar Kotagudem: KORA: Verifiable Reasoning over Knowledge Graphs with Language Model Guidance
  37. Moritz Schaefer: Patient-level agentic analysis of deeply profiled cohorts uncovers CAR T cell therapy resistance
  38. Qiaoshi Jiang: Bridging Manufacturing and Clinical Outcomes with Interpretable Machine Learning: A Real-World CAR-T Cell Therapy Case Study
  39. Xi Xiong: Bayesian Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Latent World Models
  40. Wes Madrigal: KurveRSC: Task-Selected Relational Compression for Auditable Relational Prediction
  41. Sareh Nabi: When Does Structured Knowledge Help Neural Theorem Proving?
  42. Juwon Hong: Accurate Forecasts, Wrong What-Ifs: Foundation Models on Retail Data with Known Counterfactuals
  43. David Liu: Data Disaggregation for Group Personalization and Heterogeneity in Collaborative Filtering
  44. Agapi Rissaki: Database Views as Explanations for Relational Deep Learning
  45. Miguel Santiago Feles: Beyond Imitation: Knowledge Graph–Guided Language Model Distillation
  46. Yaguang Liu, Yulian Zhou, Shubhojeet Sarkar, Shengbo Guo: Exploring Forum with Generative Modeling
  47. Saad Naseem: AI-Guided High-Throughput Media Optimization for Enhanced Rare Earth Element Bioaccumulation
  48. Diganta Das: Multi-Objective Learning for Computational Antibody Sequence Co-Optimization: Generalization Under Sparse Binary Supervision
  49. Haoxin Liu: TIMERSI: Towards Self-Improved Agentic Deployment for Time-Series Foundation Models
  50. Dinesh Katupputhur Ramprasath: Support-Set Target Leakage in Relational Foundation Models during In-Context Learning: Impact, Detection, and Mitigation
  51. Karan Paresh: Ownership Is the Missing Declaration: Deciding Relational Target Leakage from the Schema
  52. Sukwon Yun: Graph-of-Agents: A Graph-based Framework for Multi-Agent LLM Collaboration
  53. Aarav Sekhri: Toward Parameter-Efficient and Trustworthy Transformers for Stress Detection in Reddit Posts
  54. Anu Vellore: matplotgym: Can Language Models Turn Data into Publication-Quality Figures?
  55. Kargi Chauhan: Did the AI Discover It, or Remember It? A Placebo Test for AI Co-Scientists
  56. Arefeh Yavary: GENESIS: Autonomous Drug Discovery Where World Models Meet Adaptive Agents and Personalized Patient Digital Twins

Organizing committee

Lata Nair, Charilaos Kanatsoulis, Moritz Schaefer, Michael Bereket, Kuan Pang, Jure Leskovec

Prior events

2025 2024 2023 2022 2021