The closing ceremony of the Skoltech Summer School on Machine Learning (SMILES-2025) took place in Harbin, China. For the first time, the school was held outside Russia, at one of the world’s leading technical universities in the field of artificial intelligence — the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT). The general partner of SMILES-2025 was Alfa-Bank, the gold partner was Sber, and the innovation partner was the Skolkovo Fintech Hub. The scientific partner of the school was the AIRI Institute. The event was held with the support of the Central Bank of Russia.

Marat Ismagulov, HR Director of Alfa-Bank, commented: “We are delighted to be part of the SMILES-2025 summer school in Harbin. This is a significant event in the advancement of cutting-edge technologies, particularly in artificial intelligence. Participating in the project allows Alfa-Bank not only to share its expertise but also to strengthen ties with leading scientific and educational institutions in Russia and around the world.” 

Andrey Belevtsev, Senior Vice President and Head of Technology Development at Sberbank, emphasized the importance of collaboration between academic institutions and support for young scientists: “We are open to scientific and applied cooperation with researchers in the development of open generative AI technologies. The SMILES school is a great opportunity to launch new joint initiatives. This year, our experts not only prepared educational materials and delivered lectures on GenAI but also mentored students in practical projects. Additionally, the event served as an excellent networking platform — facilitating knowledge exchange and showcasing the expertise and advanced AI solutions of Sber’s teams to the tech community.”  

Sergey Dutov, Corporate Innovation Director at the Skolkovo Foundation’s Expertise and Commercialization Center, highlighted the importance of collaboration between major businesses and young researchers’ initiatives: “We thank the organizers of SMILES-2025 for the opportunity this year to pilot the integration of corporate representatives — CTOs and IT architects — into the summer school program. Such practices can become a catalyst for GenAI transformation in corporations, and we will be happy to support their joint initiatives with the Skoltech AI Center.” 

Over two weeks, participants successfully completed an intensive academic program, which included over 30 lectures by leading scientists, hands-on workshops, a poster session, mentor discussions, and large-scale teamwork on research projects. 

This year, special attention was given to project work. The final session featured 30 projects in natural language processing, computer vision, generative models, mathematical foundations of AI, and applied tasks. Participants explored modern architectures, tested models on specialized hardware, tackled image and text generation challenges, and studied the robustness of large language models and their applications in scientific scenarios. Projects were developed both in person and remotely — many teams brought together students from different cities and countries. 

A traditional poster session was held as part of the school. The jury, chaired by the school’s director, Skoltech Associate Professor and the head of the Skoltech-Sberbank Applied Research Laboratory, Alexey Zaytsev, noted the high quality of the presented work. The winners of the poster competition are:

• First place: Pengyi Li — “Confidence Is All You Need: Few-Shot RL Fine-Tuning of Language Models”
• Second place: Arina Chumachenko — “Preventing Overfitting in Subject-Driven Text-to-Image Diffusion: Regularization of Embeddings and Attention Maps”
• Third place: Bari Khayrullin — “Neural Networks for Structured Grid Generation”
• Prize from Alfa-Bank: Alexander Yugai — “Uniting Contrastive and Generative Learning for Event Sequence Models”
• Prize from Sberbank: Illarion Iov — “Graph Optimization in AutoML Workflow Using Large Language Models”

Winners of the project pitch competition:

• First place: Daria Dubinina, Fernando Leon, Timur Zakarin, Lyudmila Zavadskaya — “LLM Agents for Forecasting Public Perceptions of Central Banks”
• Second place: Alexander Yugai, Khan Tsui — “Predictive Representation Learning via Future-State Alignment”
• Third place: Maria Kovaleva, Lev Novitsky, Daniil Knyazev — “Reward Modeling for Generating Text on Images”
• Prize from Alfa-Bank: Matvey Skripkin, Peng Li, Daria Voronkova, Bo Li, Ekaterina Boyarina — “LLM Solving Proof Tasks”
• Prize from Sberbank: Daria Dubinina, Fernando Leon, Timur Zakarin, Lyudmila Zavadskaya — “LLM Agents for Forecasting Public Perceptions of Central Banks”
• Prize from the Bank of Russia: Maxim Borisov, Alexander Serov, Elizaveta Shlychkova, Lev Shepelev, Alexander Andreev — “Beyond Weight Pruning: Analysis of Dynamic Activation Sparsity”
• Special nomination from Ascend: Bari Khayrullin — “Comparative Analysis of the Speed of Matrix Calculations on Ascend”

Speaking at the closing ceremony, Maxim Gretchenko, Third Secretary of the Russian Consulate General in Harbin, remarked: “I am confident that during your time working together, you have not only mastered the latest methods and technologies of artificial intelligence but also felt the importance of international cooperation in this strategically vital field.” 

Professor Chao Shen, Deputy Dean of the International Cooperation Office at HIT, emphasized the significance of the joint initiative: “This school is a testament to the growing partnership between Harbin Institute of Technology and Skoltech and the beginning of new scientific discoveries.”

Alexey Zaytsev, Director of SMILES-2025, summarized the outcomes of the two-week intensive program: “SMILES-2025 has become an international platform where participants not only explored cutting-edge technologies but also built professional and personal connections that could evolve into major scientific projects and research. This is the core mission of our school.”