Title: MATS Research FellowLocation: Berkeley, California
Research: Optimization, learning theory, LLM inference
Email:
simon.vary@stats.ox.ac.ukEducation:
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DPhil in Mathematics, 2021
University of Oxford
MSc in Math. Modelling and Sci. Computing, 2016
University of Oxford
News: New preprint on Masked Language Flow Models!News: I will present our paper On-Average Stability of Multipass Preconditioned SGD and Effective Dimension at COLT 2026; slides here.News: I taught a hands-on Introduction to LLMs at Oxford and Imperial College London.I am a MATS Research Fellow working with Roger Grosse on data attribution methods for large language models. My broader research interests include statistical learning theory, optimization, interpretability, and efficient inference.
Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher in Statistics at the University of Oxford, working with Prof. Patrick Rebeschini on optimization and statistical learning theory. Before that, I was a visiting lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at UCLouvain, hosted by Prof. Pierre-Antoine Absil and Prof. Julien Hendrickx. I completed my DPhil in Mathematics at Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Jared Tanner, where I worked on robust PCA and low-rank plus sparse matrix sensing (thesis).