Research Fellow
Theoretical Physics, University of Oxford
UKRI Horizon Europe Guarantee Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship Award
Project: Phenomenology of Deep Learning [ukri.org]
nayara.fonsecadesa@physics.ox.ac.uk | nayara.focs@gmail.com
News
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September: Our paper, An exactly solvable model for emergence and scaling laws, was accepted at NeurIPS 2024!
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March-June: I'm participating in the AI Alignment course run by BlueDot Impact. Please feel free to reach out if you'd like to exchange ideas or explore potential collaborations.
RESEARCH
ABOUT ME
I'm a Research Fellow at Oxford Theoretical Physics, where I'm exploring the interplay between Machine Learning and Physics. I'm hosted at Ard Louis group. Before Oxford, I worked as a Research Scientist at IBM Research UK. Previously, I was at ICTP in Trieste, DESY Theory Group in Hamburg, CTP at MIT, University of São Paulo, and University of Campinas.
For more details, please see my [CV].
I am a physicist seeking ways to understand generalization in deep learning. Toward this goal, I study AI as a scientific discipline, where both empirical validity and explainable methodologies are essential. For instance, see [here] for our work on emergence and scaling laws and [here] for our work on double descent and online/offline correspondence in similarity learning.
Previously, I explored the construction of models to explain small- and large-scale phenomena in the universe. I worked on the interplay between particle physics and cosmology, learning from the early universe how to build and interpret our models of particle physics. See [here] for all publications.