ASEF Young Minds: Valter Hudovernik Inspires with Insights into Relational Deep Learning and Research at Stanford

The first popular science lecture of this year’s ASEF Young Minds series took place on February 26 as part of the Education Days at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science (FRI), featuring ASEF Research Abroad Fellow 2025 Valter Hudovernik as a guest speaker. A former FRI student and now an employee at Kumo AI, he returned to his alma mater to deliver a lecture on relational deep learning and the development of foundation models for structured data.

In his technically rich presentation, he introduced approaches to building models for tabular and relational databases, among the most widely used data formats in practice, and highlighted the role of synthetic data in their development. He also presented the research he conducted during his visit to Stanford University in the lab of Prof. Dr. Jure Leskovec.

At the beginning of the lecture, Valter shared how his research journey began: while studying, he and his classmates closely examined a scientific paper in a field related to their work. Their growing interest in the topic coincided with learning about the ASEF fellowship program. In a fortunate turn of events, they discovered that the paper’s co-author was also a co-founder of ASEF. Inspired by the opportunity, Valter applied, completed his research visit at Stanford, and continues to collaborate with the research team today.

The outcomes of his work are reflected in the following publications:

• Relational Transformer: Toward Zero-Shot Foundation Models for Relational Data
  https://cs.stanford.edu/people/jure/pubs/relational-transformer-25.pdf
• RelBench v2: A Large-Scale Benchmark and Repository for Relational Data
  https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12606

The event offered valuable insight into current research developments and demonstrated how curiosity, initiative, and international collaboration can lead to impactful scientific work.

We invite you to explore both articles and discover a field that is increasingly shaping the future of data science.

This project is supported by the Office of the Republic of Slovenia for Youth and the Government Office for Slovenians Abroad.