College of Computing - Distinguished Seminar by Professor Jianfei CAI: From LLM to Agentic AI: An Efficiency Perspective
17 December 2025 (Wednesday)
The College of Computing (CC) successfully hosted a Distinguished Seminar on 17 December 2025, featuring Prof. Jianfei Cai, Professor at the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, and a leading researcher in visual computing, computer vision, and multimedia. Prof. Cai delivered a talk titled "From LLM to Agentic AI: An Efficiency Perspective".
In the seminar, Prof. Cai explored how recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) are turning long-standing visions of autonomous AI agents into reality, highlighting their growing capabilities in understanding, reasoning, and decision-making. He then shared his group’s latest research on three key areas: improving the efficiency of LLMs, enhancing diffusion-based generative models, and developing practical agentic AI applications that help agents understand and interact with their environments more effectively. He concluded by outlining his vision for the future trajectory of AI and autonomous agents.
The lecture was well-received by CityUHK faculty, students and alumni. The audience participated enthusiastically in the Q&A session, which resulted in in-depth discussions with Professor Cai on the future of Agentic AI and its real-world applications.
(From left) Prof. Jiawei MA, Assistant Professor of Department of Computer Science; Prof. Antoni CHAN, Associate Dean of College of Computing (Research and Postgraduate); Prof. Jianfei CAI, our Speaker, Professor of Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University; Prof. Zudi LU, Professor of Department of Biostatistics
The seminar reinforced the College’s commitment to advancing cutting-edge AI and enabling students and faculty to apply emerging agentic AI technologies to real-world challenges. The College of Computing will continue to host innovative events that foster learning, collaboration, and future-ready computing talent.