About the seminar

This seminar aims to increase the links between the different laboratories in Saclay in the field of Applied Maths, Statistics and Machine Learning. The Seminar is organized every first Tuesday of the month with 2 presentations followed by a small refreshment. The localization of the seminar will change to accommodate the different labs.

Organization

Due to access restriction, you need to register for the seminar. A link is provided in the description and should also be sent with the seminar announcement. It will also help us organize for the food quantities. If you think you will come, please register! (even if you are unsure)

To not miss the next seminar, please subscribe to the announcement mailing list subscribe/palaisien.
You will receive email on the palaisien@inria.fr mailing list.
You can also add the calendar from the seminar to your own calendar (see below).

Next seminars

REGISTER 06 Oct 2026, 12h At Inria Saclay - Amphi Sophie Germain
TBA
TBA
Julie Alberge - SurvICL: In-Context Learning for Survival Analysis
Survival analysis aims to predict the time until an event of interest, such as death, disease progression, or equipment failure. Unlike standard regression, it must account for censoring, which occurs when the event has not been observed for some individuals, for example because they leave the study or the study ends. This makes survival prediction particularly challenging, especially on small datasets commonly encountered in clinical research. Recent advances in tabular foundation models...
Survival analysis aims to predict the time until an event of interest, such as death, disease progression, or equipment failure. Unlike standard regression, it must account for censoring, which occurs when the event has not been observed for some individuals, for example because they leave the study or the study ends. This makes survival prediction particularly challenging, especially on small datasets commonly encountered in clinical research.

Recent advances in tabular foundation models have demonstrated remarkable performance in classification and regression, often outperforming traditional methods such as gradient-boosted trees. However, their success has not yet translated to survival analysis, where the Cox proportional hazards model, introduced over 50 years ago, remains a strong baseline.

In this talk, we introduce SurvICL, a tabular foundation model that predicts individual survival curves through in-context learning, without dataset-specific training or hyperparameter tuning. SurvICL is pretrained entirely on synthetic datasets generated from a flexible proportional-odds prior and learns to predict survival curves using a simple quantile regression loss. We also present our benchmark of 63 survival datasets, the largest to date, and show how SurvICL outperforms 20 competing methods, including classical statistical models, tree-based approaches, deep learning methods, and other foundation models. In particular, SurvICL is the first tabular foundation model to outperform Cox on small survival datasets.
REGISTER 10 Nov 2026, 12h At Inria Saclay - Amphi Sophie Germain

Scientific Committee

The program and the organization of this seminar is driven by a scientific committee composed of members of the different laboratories in Saclay. The members of the committee are currently:

Funding

This seminar is made possible with financial support of the ENSAE and DataIA.