Séb Arnold

Updated October 11, 2019

\( % Universal Mathematics \newcommand{\paren}[1]{\left( #1 \right)} \newcommand{\brackets}[1]{\left[ #1 \right]} \newcommand{\braces}[1]{\left\{ #1 \right\}} \newcommand{\norm}[1]{\left\lVert#1\right\rVert} \newcommand{\case}[1]{\begin{cases} #1 \end{cases}} \newcommand{\bigO}[1]{\mathcal{O}\left(#1\right)} % Analysis % Linear Algebra \newcommand{\mat}[1]{\begin{pmatrix}#1\end{pmatrix}} \newcommand{\bmat}[1]{\begin{bmatrix}#1\end{bmatrix}} % Probability Theory \DeclareMathOperator*{\V}{\mathop{\mathrm{Var}}} \DeclareMathOperator*{\E}{\mathop{\mathbb{E}}} \newcommand{\Exp}[2][]{\E_{#1}\brackets{#2}} \newcommand{\Var}[2][]{\V_{#1}\brackets{#2}} \newcommand{\Cov}[2][]{\mathop{\mathrm{Cov}}_{#1}\brackets{#2}} % Optimization \newcommand{\minimize}{\operatorname*{minimize}} \newcommand{\maximize}{\operatorname*{maximize}} \DeclareMathOperator*{\argmin}{arg\,min} \DeclareMathOperator*{\argmax}{arg\,max} % Set Theory \newcommand{\C}{\mathbb{C}} \newcommand{\N}{\mathbb{N}} \newcommand{\Q}{\mathbb{Q}} \newcommand{\R}{\mathbb{R}} \newcommand{\Z}{\mathbb{Z}} \)

I am a doctoral student in the ShaLab supervised by Fei Sha. My research topic lies at the intersection of optimization and reinforcement learning.

I did my undergraduate at the University of Southern California, double majoring in Computer Science and Mathematics. My research focused on machine learning, and mathematical optimization.

I also like skiing (a lot).

[Contact, Resume, GitHub, Twitter]

Me and motorcycle hair

 




News

Variance of Policy Gradient

Our preprint on Analyzing the variance of policy gradient estimators for LQR was accepted at the OptRL NeurIPS workshop. [ArXiv, pdf]


Implicit Gradient Transport

Our paper on Reducing the variance in online optimization by transporting past gradients was accepted at NeurIPS as a spotlight contribution. [ArXiv, pdf, website, code]


Open-Sourcing learn2learn

Our submission to the PyTorch Summer Hackathon won best in show! Check out the website to learn how to easily implement meta-learning algorithms with learn2learn. [website, code]


East European Summer School

I will be attending the East-European Summer School this summer. Get in touch if you will too!