James Town

My name is James and I'm a current student in the MathSys II CDT under the supervision of Professor Ranko Lazic (DCS), Dr Matthias Englert (DCS), and Professor Nikolaos Zygouras (WMI). My research focuses on understanding the implicit bias of gradient based learning algorithms. By implicit bias, we mean the tendency of a class of algorithms designed to optimise the parameters of some function to find solutions with certain properties. These might include the minimisation of some property like the norm of parameters or the rank of a feature matrix. See Vardi (2023)^[1] for a review of the area.

I'm also interested in the phenomenon of model collapse, a process in which the performance of generative models declines (losing both diversity and accuracy) over iterations of retraining the model on its own data.

[1] Gal Vardi. 2023. On the Implicit Bias in Deep-Learning Algorithms. Commun. ACM 66, 6 (June 2023), 86–93. https://doi.org/10.1145/3571070