Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel

Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel: I am interested in mathematics and AI alignment. I work in Samson Abramsky's group at UCL. Outside of graduate school, I serve as Chief Bard at Timaeus.

Research I Want to Mentor

Area: Inductive Bias in LLMs

Project: "Inductive bias of stochastic gradient descent".

Modern machine learning is all done by a variant of stochastic gradient descent on deep learning networks. This project is a pilot project for stress-testing mathematical models from prof. Strang's expertise ( Langevin stochastic dynamics, Fokker-Planck equations') for the inductive bias and behaviour of SGD. Understanding what the inductive bias of training processes is and whether it might be biased towards deceptive aligned AI has long been understood as important to AI alignment, see for example.

The current project is more preliminary; it does not purport to be able to settle this question directly but aims to make to stresstest mathematical models of that give precise quantitative predictions in toy models. The hope is that these may be eventually scaled to also give quantitative predictions at scale.

What I'm Looking for in a Mentee

We’re looking for mentees with a strong mathematical background and familiarity with coding & neural networks.

You might be able to visit Berkeley for a period to work on this project.